Patient Care Quality: Articles Analysis
Article One
Patient safety is a significant public issue worldwide. In their article about temporal trends in patient harm rates, Landrigan et al. (2124) addressed the results of the Institute of Medicine’s research during the last ten years and proved that safety and quality issues had remained to be unclear. North Carolina was a site where recent patient safety improvements were discussed in terms of new safety training programs offered to stakeholders. The article was based on the analysis of randomly selected medical records of patients hospitalized in North Carolina between January 2002 and December 2007 (Landrigan et al. 2125). With the help of two-stage reviews, it was possible to gather appropriate and reliable information for statistical analysis. The types of harm were divided into categories and marked regarding the possibility of their prevention. The vulnerability of the study was based on the necessity to use voluntary reports which could not be regularly and properly organized. The authors introduced several methods that could be used to improve their study and identify new perspectives in the analysis of patient safety in US hospitals.
At the end of the study, it was proved that North Carolina was the state where medical care led to patient harm in different ways. The rates of harm care continued increasing regardless of the attention paid at the national level and the availability of resources with the help of which it was possible to improve care safety. North Carolina was defined as a leading state that aimed at improving its care conditions for patients. Therefore, such results proved that the United States required new policies, programs, and ideas on how to promote some new improvements in such fields as infection prevalence, surgical complications, and patient-medical worker relationships.
Article Two
In the case study developed by Hublet et al. the concept of patient care quality was properly introduced and discussed in terms of wait times at the Saintemarie Hospital Emergency Department. The authors stated that the inability to serve all patients properly and on time led to the development of certain concerns and the necessity to offer urgent improvements. For example, there was a female patient who had to wait for 18 hours to be examined. Emergency congestion was defined as a problem for both the medical staff of the hospital and their patients. To find a solution to that problem, the leaders had to take several steps and make certain decisions with the help of which it was possible to identify the main challenges in the industry and true reasons for delays in emergency care. Three different levels of work had been improved to shorten the wait time at the hospital, including the changes in the initial wait where all patients had to be registered and sorted in regards to the emergency of their cases, patient management according to which nurses had to identify patients and their primary examination needs, and patient discharge that showed the results of the examination and further actions for patients to be taken (Hublet et al.).
The results of the article helped to understand that one hospital could promote quality improvements in case all management decisions and steps were made and taken properly. The wait time was considerably shortened. The demands and healthcare needs of patients were met. Still, the economic concerns were raised because not all patients were able to meet a doctor and obtain the required portion of help so that they found it normal to address private clinics and ask for help that cost a lot.
Works Cited
Hublet, Laurent et al. “Emergency Department Congestion at Saintemarie University Hospital.”Columbia Business School. 2011, Web.
Landrigan, Christopher, P. et al. “Temporal Trends in Rates of Patient Harm Resulting from Medical Care.” New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 363, no. 22, 2011, pp. 2124-2134.