Patients Safety and Quality Health Care
Health care workers focus on delivering quality health care to all patients to ensure that patients are safe from killer diseases, consequent infections and falls. A patient’s safety is a goal for every health care worker. It is, therefore, important for health care workers to have leadership qualities to ensure that good health care is administered to patients. For health care workers to provide high quality health care, they have to consider various factors.
Their health care should be effective, patient-centered, safe, time efficient and equitable. There are also some important elements that can contribute to patient safety if observed in a hospital. They include individualized care, an environment that is healing, transparency and decisions made with evidence. The use of information technology is a major contributor to delivering quality health care. Health care workers should open dialogues with patients for them to ask questions about medications, tests and various care activities.
Cultural Diversity in Health Care
A culture incorporates beliefs, various dressing modes, practices and eating habits. Health care workers and patients have different cultures and all belong to different races. Different cultures should be learned in medical schools for health workers to appreciate cultures of patients plus of their co-workers. Hospitals should administer quality care to patients despite their religion, genders and age. Problems related to cultural diversity include discrimination, language barriers and feeling isolated. To solve these issues, medical students should at least learn two different international languages for those patients who may not speak English.
Health care workers should, therefore, employ a technique of understanding different customs. Cultural diversity is experienced in hospitals when health workers encounter patients who have different health beliefs. There are some cultures that do not allow a male patient to be treated by a female health worker. In this case, their opinions can either be respected or be advised otherwise.
Care Delivery Strategies
There are various strategies employed in hospitals to provide quality health care without making it costly to patients. These strategies include team work, good leadership, primary care, delegation and health informatics. In order to employ these strategies, various factors must be considered such as the size of the hospital, cultural diversity, organizational goals and population of patients in the hospital. A case method is another strategy where a health worker attends to one patient at a particular time.
This applies to medical students or to patients who are very ill. Team work motivates workers to work well. It makes the working environment bearable even to new workers. Leadership helps to coordinate hospital staff. Delegation is another important strategy where health care is offered by unlicensed medical personnel under the supervision of a registered medical officer. This strategy is important when there are a few registered medical officers. Use of technology in handling information is also an important strategy that should be embraced by large institutions.
Selecting, Developing, and Evaluating Staff
The process of selecting, developing and evaluating staff always starts with an interview. This process is important because it ensures that the health care workers employed are qualified and can provide quality health care. When individuals are given certain roles; they are expected to offer their best. The selection process involves a series of steps. Interviews are done with various questions aimed at knowing an applicant more.
Information gathered includes experience and skills gained. Serious candidate are then screened to determine the best candidate for the roles offered. The decision is then made to select suitable candidates. The chosen employees are then developed by being trained to fit into the schedule of the hospital. During the training, a program is followed by the new employees to help them transform from being students to experienced staffs. The new employees learn the mission and goals of the hospital. They are aided and advised by staff managers.
Consumer Relationships
Staffs are required to have a good relationship with their patients. In this case, they are the consumers because they pay for the services they are given. Like every business, customer satisfaction comes first. This is usually one of the major goals of any organization. This is achieved when quality health care is given to patients and this promotes the name of the organization. Hospitals are also awarded for having good consumer relationships. Measures are then supposed to be taken in a hospital to ensure that the hospital administration has a good relationship with hospital staff.
The hospital staff is advised to be committed to its work, to work in teams, to be caring and to have good communication. Patients are not supposed to be discriminated according to their culture or race. Instead, they are supposed to be given good care despite their different cultures. There are good hospitals that are actively involved in protecting the rights of the customers. Lastly, health care workers can have good relationships with patients if they listen to their questions, answer them and offer guidance and support.
Managing Personal Problems
Medical personnel sometimes encounter problems either related to work, home or other social environments. They report to work looking distressed and withdrawn. Most problems reported by health workers include spousal conflicts and discrimination at work place. Various measures are then taken in hospitals like giving advice, corrections and intercessions. There are those health workers who have personal problems of reporting to work late and others fail to report to work.
Other health workers are uncooperative and some are incompetent. Good leadership is therefore important to reduce these problems because leaders will discourage such behaviors. Problems act as a hindrance to health workers in delivering good care and damage good relationships enjoyed between them and patients. Failing to report to work is costly to a hospital because a hospital has to do replacements and pay extra money. Those who have a problem of cooperation should be motivated and be given a good environment to work in.
Delegation
Delegation is a good practice that will benefit medical students in their future careers. Delegation refers to giving work to someone else. This is mostly practiced in health care where registered and experienced health care workers give work to unregistered personnel of the hospital. This becomes useful when there are a lot of patients to attend to. It is also useful when there is few health care staff caused by either poor attendance or incompetence.
There is sharing of work between registered health workers and unregistered hospital personnel. Before a medical worker can delegate, he or she has to seek authority from the concerned party. The person being delegated the work of health care must have some skills and education to do the work. Most of them do short courses which enable them to be given the work of delegation. They work as assistants in theaters, intensive care units and maternities.