Introduction
Healthcare organizations are obliged to continually improve the patients’ quality of life by providing standard and evidence-based care. Definitively, variation refers to any difference in the outcomes or processes of healthcare in comparison to the best practices, gold standard, and peer. In his writings, W. Edwards Deming says that uncontrolled variation will always have a negative outcome on the quality and efficiency of practice (Ferguson, 2021). The implication is that medical professionals should strive to achieve high reliability in the services that they offer. Thus, controlling unintended variation is one of the central objectives in healthcare institutions, as it erodes quality and results in unnecessary costs.
Main body
Notably, variation cannot be avoided when dealing with humans because of their unique individual characteristics. An example of acceptable variation in healthcare is choosing not to use chemotherapy for a patient with a cancerous tumor of the brain, as is typical for all other clients with the same condition, after noticing that the tumor has spread to an extent that it is impossible to save the patient’s life. In such a case, the practitioner needs to ensure that such deviation from guidelines is acceptable and that the person has personalized decision-making so that they do not feel guilty.
Unacceptable variations occur when obvious biases, negligence, and prejudices result in poor outcomes for some patients. Ozcan (2017) further explains that such variations result in unacceptable errors leading to patient dissatisfaction, repeated morbidity, long hospital stays, and disability. For example, a nurse decides to neglect perioperative temperature monitoring of some patients based on the short duration of surgery or outward characteristics. Resultantly, some of the patients develop hypothermia which complicates the operation and leads to prolonged hospital stays. Such variation has no valid reason for not following the guidelines leading to unethical behavior and low quality. Moreover, such neglect of standard best practices results in reputational damage.
Conclusion
It is important to understand variation before improving the process because it makes it easy to understand the required transformation and evaluate the performance. Gaining clarity about the root cause of differences in practice is the first step in setting goals for the improvement of patient safety and quality control (Sreeramoju et al., 2020). For example, when a nurse understands that the distinction in practice is caused by a lack of policy to standardize processes, the objective will be to develop guidelines. Moreover, understanding variation helps identify what is acceptable and assign responsibility for negligence errors.
References
Ferguson, J. (2021). Reducing variation in healthcare to boost improvement. Health Catalyst. Web.
Ozcan, Y. A. (2017). Analytics and decision support in health care operations management. John Wiley & Sons.
Sreeramoju, P. V., Palmore, T. N., Lee, G. M., Edmond, M. B., Patterson, J. E., Sepkowitz, K. A., Goldmann, D. A., Henderson, D. K., & Kaye, K. S. (2020). Institutional quality and patient safety programs: An overview for the healthcare epidemiologist. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology, 42(1), 6-17. Web.