“Patient-focused care” has been one of the principles adopted by various hospitals and healthcare institutions in the United States. Cross-training of professionals and pare-professionals employed by the hospitals, grouping patient services having similar characteristics, and integrating quality aspects in the total patient service and clinical management are some of the other principles underlying patient-focused care.
Texsan Heart Hospital
Structural design changes adopted by Texsan Heart Hospital can be cited as an example of patient-focused care measures taken by a health care organization. Texsan Heart capital is one of the leading acute care facilities providing cardiovascular care to the Southwest region. The objective of patient-focused care is to ensure the comfort of the patients and their families, by providing advanced diagnosis, treatment and therapy.
The patients are made to have access to advanced technology and surgical techniques. Patient care is made the focus of the personal needs, comforts and convenience of the patients. Uniquely designed private rooms prevent unnecessary stress and the necessity to transport the patients from one room to the other. “Staffing based on acuity levels promotes lower nurse to patient ratios, which is another important component of Texsan’s patient-focused care model.” (Texsan Heart Hospital) The nurse to patient ratio has been made low as compared to other similar hospitals. Thus, the key objective of patient-focused care at Texsan is to simplify the processes and moving patient services closer to the patients.
The employees are made productive by cross-training and integrating quality improvement systems in all types of patients’ services. This has eliminated the process of providing in-patient services through small, specialized and fragmented units. Instead, the services are being provided from centralized ancillary departments to ensure patient-focused care is delivered to the customers.
Bon Secours Hospital
Bon Secours is another health care facility where sweeping changes were undertaken to make the organization a patient-focused care unit. The hospital engaged a multidisciplinary team to develop a patient-focused care system. The objective of this team was to redesign the complete documentation system at the clinical management level to improve productivity, communication, coordination, and improved quality of patient care services.
The team started its work from the process of identifying improvements in treatments, nutrition, safety, physical therapy, diagnostics, and consultation among other activities. The team considered the implementation through careful planning of an entirely new documentation system to enhance patient-focused care. Implementation planning consisted of three distinct phases of
- review and approval of new documentation forms,
- development of standards to support the documentation and
- education of all disciplines.
The implementation of the structural changes was conducted in a pilot unit and the team, evolved methods to measure the success made through the implementation of changes. Quality characteristics like time-saving, improved communication, usability, the flow of information, comprehensiveness, readability of the entire documentation process has been evolved as a part of the new documentation system. Changes in the clinical management records formed the basis of improvement in the patient focused care in Bon Secours Hospital (Mosher, Rademacher and Day).
The improvements provided for the mechanism that could promote an efficient collaboration among disciplines through an improved clinical documentation procedure to get the desired patient focused care outcome. Effective coordination between the services and open and cohesive communication between different disciplines have been identified to be the key element in delivering an efficient patient focused service to the patients.
Works Cited
Mosher, Cindi, et al. Documenting for Patient-Focused Care. 1996. Web.
TexsanHeartHospital. Patient-Focused Care. Web.