Tag: Hospital at Home

Hospital Associated Pneumonia Prevention

Hospital associated pneumonia has become a great concern nowadays. According to WHO, pneumonia acquired from hospitals’ morbidity and mortality rates are staggering high. For those who are not aware, pneumonia that starts in the hospital tends to be more serious than other lung infections.

This growing concern is due to several factors. Usually, the infection spreads when patients use respirators – machine for breathing. During hospital stay, patients are more vulnerable to germs or viruses since they are not well enough to fit the off. Patients who are more prone to this disease in the hospital are those who had surgeries, chemo therapy (cancer treatment with low immunity), have chronic lung disease, elderly, and alcoholic.

Germs are also passed from one health care staff to another through hand contact or clothing. This is why they are required to wear gloves and masks when on duty. There are also other ways to avoid the dreadful disease.

The best way to stop the spread of germs is through frequent hand washing, stay at home when sick, and boost immunity. People who need to visit their loved ones in the hospital must make sure that they have taken steps in preventing the spread of germs: bring hand sanitizer, wear masks and gloves, and never bring an infant or child. If you have contact with a person in the hospital, never place your hand from your face. When someone coughs or sneezes, cover your nose and mouth with clean tissue or hanky. Do the same when you sneeze or cough as well.

In-patients who are very young and old or very ill at greater risk of such infections. To prevent the spread of germs, get up-to-date vaccination. Ask your doctor about flu and anti-viral vaccinations available. With good preventive measures, you can ensure to have a disease-free life.

Improving Healthcare Services

From healthcare discoveries to the most recent treatment options, America’s healthcare educational institutions and teaching hospitals, as well as their doctors and experts, possess a legacy of developing treatments and establishing the standard for the best patient health care. By way of a multi-year initiative to enhance the standard and security of health care, it is vital to work together to generate guidelines for better quality health care.

Through guidelines for much better Healthcare, it is necessary to integrate verified methods to guarantee more secure surgeries, decrease infections, and reduce hospital re-admissions. We must built an even tougher tradition of quality and protection in medicine by passing these guidelines to each new doctor educated and make sure high quality and safety is part of medical training from day one. Through good research and evaluation, best practices will be improved, learn new ones, and discuss our knowledge with others to enhance health care.

It is, of course, the responsibility of a hospital to secure their patients by giving quality standards, updating procedures, regular maintenance and developing technology. The health care education facilities must be able to educate the next era of doctors with quality and patient security. Through continued research and study, patients must be more secure with safer surgeries. Hospitals must as well develop or enhance a program that will reduce the hospital re-admissions especially for high-risk patients. This will reduce the hospital cost and the stress of staying long in hospital wards away from home.

Lastly, there must be a continued investigation, research and examination of new and efficient health care practices as well as the use of efficient technologies to establish a better future of the health care industry.

Home Patient Care

To corrupt an old quotation, there is nothing like a new transaction program to focus the mind of a medical center manager. The U.S. medical care program is seeing a surge of distribution program analysis, motivated by numerous transaction projects such as CMS’s medical center readmissions reduction program (established through the Affordable Care Act).   New patient care designs, such as the Presbyterian Healthcare Service’s “Hospital at Home” in Albuquerque, New Mexico and the Mercy Health “Care Transitions Program” in Cincinnati, Ohio are moving patient care out of the constraints of hospitals and medical centers and placing them to the individual’s houses. There, individual knowledge and care synchronization may be more effective, thus avoiding additional expensive medical center bills.

home_patient_carePreliminary data recommend that these programs work. Yet the record of the U.S. medical care program informs us that these interesting projects can crumple to perverse actions.  The execution of inpatient potential transaction in 1983 triggered the home medical market. However, along with improved patient care in houses came issues about sky-rocketing costs, excessive use, unsuitable use, and scams.

To find the ‘special sauce’ that will truly move our wellness care program from one targeted on dealing with illness to one targeted on health, we need to carefully assess these interesting new projects, in particular, looking at their impact on the greatest endpoint, population health.  The problem of paying for health rather than illness has been a traditional situation. As George Bernard Shaw mentioned in 1906, “That any sane nation, having observed that you could provide for the supply of bread by giving bakers a pecuniary interest in baking for you, should go on to give a surgeon a pecuniary interest in cutting off your leg, is enough to make one despair of political humanity.” If GBS were in existence today he might be very carefully buoyed up by the current initiatives to deal with this centuries old situation.