Introduction
The quality of the delivered healthcare services depends on the quality of public health infrastructure that consists of hospitals and laboratories, medical staff members, equipment, and even information systems. During the past several decades, healthcare has experienced an appreciable development due to the application of new technologies and ongoing progress in science. Therefore, people all over the country gained access to more efficient and less costly treatment methods. The present essay describes the components of the public health infrastructure that contributed to the progress in public health outcomes and explains which of them are the most important.
Main body
One of the most significant factors that affect the quality of the delivered health care services is the employees of healthcare facilities. The knowledge, skills, and training level of administrators, nurses, physicians, and narrow-profile specialists determine whether a patient can be successfully cured. Within this broad scope of healthcare workers, particular attention should be paid to people who take the leading positions in a states health department, healthcare facilities, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies (Lavinghouze et al., 2014). These specialists are of great significance because they coordinate interaction between the different levels of infrastructure (Lavinghouze et al., 2014). What is more, strong leadership ensures not only cooperation between all the levels of infrastructure but also the linkage between its various components (Lavinghouze et al., 2014)? Generally speaking, effective leadership is a cornerstone of any organization, be it a multinational corporation or a small non-profit organization. Therefore, the development of the public healthcare system is impossible without health departments and facilities being superintended by effective and experienced leaders with a vast background in the sphere of public health.
The second component to be discussed is information technology (IT). The application of digital technologies in the healthcare system has numerous advantages. For example, IT streamlines the process of tracking the results of a patients analyses and enables doctors to access them at any time at any place. Besides, IT simplifies the working process of healthcare specialists and releases a great deal of paperwork. According to the study conducted by Walker and Mark (2016), more than 50 percent of American hospitals have the capabilities to “electronically submit to immunization registries,” “report laboratory results,” and “report syndromic surveillance” (p. 180). However, the problem is that some of them hesitate to introduce IT to the working process. Despite this fact, IT still plays an enormous role in the optimization of responsibilities of doctors and makes the treatment process more manageable.
As has already been noted above, another critical component of healthcare infrastructure is equipment utilized by the medical staff members. This topic is closely related to the previously mentioned IT and technological development. Advanced medical equipment allows to release of nurses and doctors from the performance of repetitive tasks and minimizes the possibility of error (Mohamed & Al-Jaroodi, 2019). Additionally, the newest equipment enables doctors to make a more precise diagnosis within a shorter time (Mohamed & Al-Jaroodi, 2019). Thus, even though installation of such components of public health infrastructure as advanced equipment is costly, it helps to increase the quality of the delivered care and, therefore, improves public health conditions all over the nation.
Conclusion
To conclude, out of the three components of public health infrastructure, the most important one is human resources. Digital technologies and equipment could only improve the working conditions of the personnel and increase the efficiency of their work. Nonetheless, any hospital could provide decent services without educated and skilled staff members, no matter how good its equipment is. From this, it could be inferred that it is necessary to invest foremost in the education and training of nurses, physicians, and doctors.
References
Lavinghouze, S. R., Snyder, K., & Rieker, P. P. (2014). The component model of infrastructure: a practical approach to understanding public health program infrastructure. American journal of public health, 104(8), e14-e24. Web.
Mohamed, N., & Al-Jaroodi, J. (2019). The impact of Industry 4.0 on healthcare system engineering. 2019 IEEE International Systems Conference, 1-7. Web.
Walker, D. M., & Mark, D. L. (2016). Hospital adoption of health information technology to support public health infrastructure. Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, 22(2), 175-181. Web.