CMS and Refusal of Payment for Poor Services: Considering One of the Opinions
The recent change in the CMS policies, particularly, the one concerning the refusal of payment for poor quality services received from the hospital staff, is bound to trigger a range of changes in the U.S. healthcare setting (Hebda & Czar, 2013, p. 342). There are a range of people promoting the given strategy, and there are just as many of those, who are completely against it. The article published recently in the New York Times sheds some light on the problem, though admittedly taking the side of promoting the new opportunity in a very obvious manner.
According to what news media claim, the nurse-sensitive outcomes of the newly adopted law are quite tangible. In her article Patients’ costs skyrocket; specialists’ incomes soar, Elizabeth Rosenthal addresses the issue in question by evaluating the responsibilities that nurses will have to take in addition to the ones that they already have, stressing that the nurses’ salaries will remain the same. According to Rosenthal, “Whether the physician or the nurse wields the scalpel, the charge is generally the same” (Rosenthal, 2014, para.36). Therefore, Rosenthal argues that the newly adopted law will trigger financial inequality among the healthcare staff. Though Rosenthal outlines the ways in which the new law affects not only nurses but also patients, the focus still remains on the effects that the refusal for payment has on nursing staff. Seeing how the author of the article takes a very specific case of surgery as an example, one might argue that Rosenthal’s examples are rather farfetched. However, the conclusions and general observations provided by Rosenthal seem quite reasonable, which makes the article very credible and trustworthy. The author does not exaggerate, but merely evaluates the key financial outcomes, specifying the basic problem with the CMS reform.
Alarms and Health Issues: Analyzing a Major Ethical Issue
Keeping the alarm on is an important element of providing the patient with the required healthcare services; as long as every possible method is employed for the corresponding services to be provided regularly, the faster recovery of the patient is facilitated. Therefore, shutting off the alarm is fraught with a number of consequences, both legal and ethical. On the one hand, the unpleasant sound of an alarm can affect the patient’s state, making them nervous and disrupting their sleep. The latter is a very negative factor, which may possibly jeopardize the entire recovery process, not to mention the fact that the patient may develop neuroses because of the alarm factor. However, shutting off the alarm means that the patient may skip another intervention procedure or any other element of the treatment prescribed. Among the major ethical problems that switching the alarm off triggers, the deterioration of the patient’s health due to skipping a specific treatment procedure should be mentioned.
According to the data provided in recent studies, the value of alarms is rather high. For example, one cannot possibly deny the importance of the “alarms alerting the nurse of significant abnormal findings” (Hebda & Czar, 2013, p. 118), since such findings usually presuppose that urgent measures should be undertaken. Apart from emergencies, the use of alarms should also be encouraged for the nursing staff to be more accurate in following the schedule for interventions and healthcare procedures, as “most organizations focus security efforts on their internal networks” (Hebda & Czar, 2013, p. 95). Therefore, alarms are crucial when it comes to creating a proper time management strategy within the nursing setting.
Reference List
Hebda, T., & Czar, P. (2013). Handbook of informatics for nurses & healthcare professionals (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.
Rosenthal, E. (2014). Patients’ costs skyrocket; specialists’ incomes soar.New York Times. Web.