Introduction
Standard patient care is the basis on which negligence and errors can be determined in medical malpractice According to Arnold (1997) it’s the level of care, skill, and knowledge, expected or required of all health care providers in a given field, in a particular place, and acting in similar situations. Substandard patient care, diagnosis, and therapy occur when a health care provider fails to achieve or meet high level of care. All licensed doctor and nurses need to have the general level of skills. They should all be in position to diagnose and provide proper treatment to basic injuries and illness. For instance, it is not necessary that a physician or a doctor be a heart specialist to administer first aid to a person suffering from heart attack. However, all health care providers will not respond to a heart attack like the heart expert is likely to react. Furthermore, a physician who has the sophisticated and improved equipments is expected to provide better and quality care than one with limited resources.
According to Arnold (1997) substandard patient care may be as a result of lack of enough resources for staffing facilities and lack of experienced health providers. The situation may be produced by the actions of the patient her or himself, or by his or her family members, or by the administrative failure to provide required services, or lack of extra tools and resources in the process of providing treatment to the patient.
A personal experience with substandard patient care
The term substandard patient care has been used in this report to take into considerations both the failure in clinical care and also some of the issues that may have caused a low standard of care for the patient. The patient died from low standard care because of the inability of the hospital to administer and interpret stat echocardiograms.The hospital had no clear list of the doctors on –call by specialty, indicating disorganization of the management. Unable to provide these services to emergency rooms, led to the patients death from severe mitral valve leakages. The patient was not attended to soon enough by the doctor, and the pulmonologist consulted by the emergency department was not on call that day, thus was attending to other people at that particular moment. This led to a significant delay between the inquiries to attend to the patient, and when he was finally attended to. Furthermore, there was also more than three –hour delay in finding an echocardiogram requested for by the physician when he arrived at the hospital. Therefore, the patient passed away from cardiac arrest as the procedure and time taken to diagnose the mitral valve conditions for proper treatment was prolonged.
This was total medical malpractice of gross negligence by the healthcare providers of that hospital. The hospital was aware of the high rate of a life threatening medical emergency, which will require the use of stat echocardiogram services. It was also aware that those equipments were major elementary part of the emergency department services, but never took a step to fix the problem or even make arrangement of providing the them to the emergency department patients.
How it relates to quality care
According to Curtis (2006) quality care is the degree to which health services for individuals and populations improve the likelihood of needed health results and persistent with current knowledge and skills. This indicates that, advanced quality care improves the likelihood for better outcome. Bad results may occur even when there is better possible health care because disease often overpowers the best efforts of health care providers. However, patients may respond well even with low quality care because human beings tend to be resilient (Curtis, 2006). Therefore, there is always unexpected aspect of health care, but the services offered need to do more good than harm to an individual, depending on the best available knowledge about the patient, and about the efficiencies of a particular kind of treatment for patients with same health problems. Thus, quality care has a relation to the above case. The hospital was aware of encountering danger because of lack of stat echocardiogram services in the emergency department, but did not make any effort to provide it urgently. The hospital staff was also aware that, it was their responsibility to ensure availability of enough staff on call to take care of the patients, and a problem would occur if a physician had no information on who to contact if they needed specialist urgently. Therefore, this information combined with advertisement the hospital had made to the public concerning full time availability of its emergency department services is efficient enough to indicate some characteristics of gross negligence to the hospital and poor quality care of the patient (Curtis, 2006).
Curtis (2006) describes that quality care requires that involved parties: doctors, people, and the public are in position to differentiate quality issues from those occurring from presence of resources whether exerted by budget hardships or by inefficient provision of care. If there is limited quality of care as measured by the developed procedure, then they should be able to recognize it. For instance, the reasons may not only include breakdown of systems of care but also lack of information or experience. In this case, the hospital did not have the necessary equipment to meet the needs of the patient and the quality of its services was not effective because it lacked enough resources. For example, they advertised that the emergency department was fully equipped yet never had a list of those specialists on –call that could handle special kind of problems as required, hence poor quality care.
Conclusion
In the current world, competitive health care environment demand quality improvements. The main objective of all health care physicians and doctors is to fulfill the patients desire of having better and health care services. The health care organizations are most likely to remain behind in competitive markets if they fail to strive to provide quality services. Therefore, aiming at quality services enables health care organizations to achieve many benefits such as meeting patient satisfaction and satisfactory performance by the doctors or nurses. Substandard patient care conditions and practices are as a result of lack of reliable resources, tools, and supplies to the organization. This makes it difficult for health care providers to perform their duties and responsibilities to the maximum. Therefore, in order to significantly improve the quality of health care services, it is advisable that every system participant be accountable for the results. This can be made possible by measuring and comparing results because it is the most vital step in improving health care systems. The government should also be involved in ensuring that health care centers have enough resources according to its needs.
Reference List
Arnold, D. (1997).Handbook of health care management. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.
Curtis, P. (2006).Continual quality improvement in health care. USA: Jones and Bartlett Learning.