Patient Care and Safety | Distance Learning Systems (DLSI)

Improved Patient Care

Health is wealth, as the saying goes. And for those who are not in good health, the next best thing that we can ask for is to receive the best patient care from our health care providers. With the increasing demand for better care, greater awareness among the public, more health care regulation, keener competition, the rise in medical malpractice litigation, and concern about poor outcomes, we can say that improving patient care should be a priority.

To improve patient care, there are medical and non-medical factors to be considered, as well as a comprehensive system that is “patient oriented” and improves both medical and non-medical aspects must be adopted.

Before anything else, it must be recognized by all those who work in the system that the patient is the most important person in a medical care system. This single factor makes a significant difference to the patient care in any hospital. With patients being the priority, the health care provider is able to create a management system that emphasizes on cost recovery. A patient who receives high quality services and can afford it is one way to tell that patient care has improved and at the same time patient satisfaction is higher.

The non-medical factors that should be considered to improve patient care are the following: accessibility and availability of both hospital and the physician should be assured to all those who require health care, waiting times for services should be minimized, information should be made very clear, check-in and check-out procedures should be “patient-friendly”, communication with the patient and the family about possible delay should be done, and ancillary services should be available to both patient and attending families.

Some of the medical aspects to be considered for improved patient care are: well-trained personnel, present and properly maintained equipment, use of proper instruments, use of appropriate medications, and use of newer technologies.

Physician Efficiency vs. Patient Involvement in Patient Care

Having to go through a medical process can really be a frustrating experience especially when the patient is left unknowing about it. But how much does a patient want to know about and be involved in their own care? The response to this question cannot be fully relied on a single answer simply because many personalities and emotional complexities are involved when it comes to patient care.

Doctors like to simplify issues into neat categories, each of which have a clear management plan. This, however, is not necessarily applicable in patient care especially when it involves different personalities and emotions. One cannot simply eliminate the feelings of patients especially when satisfaction of the care they receive is involved.

In this case, the battle between increased physician efficiency through well-planned medical processes and better healthcare understanding buy the patient is the dilemma. Which of the two is best for patient care? There is reasonable argument for both.

A well thought of medical plan can be beneficial to an extent. There are physicians that prefer to spend their day practicing in a world of medical fact and deductive reasoning without taking into consideration patient reaction. The more practice, the less the mistakes are. But it can be argued that higher efficiency does not represent the rate at which patients are satisfied customers.

On the patient side, the ability of the medical team to involve them in their own care and make them aware of the plan lessen the patient’s frustrations with treatment. Doctors that are well-loved by their patients are those who spend time with them, to answer questions and provide a picture of what the coming days and weeks might look like. However, it can be argued that most of the questions can be answered not necessarily by the doctors themselves but by a less senior and equally able medical practitioners working for the admitting service.

Both have valid arguments and probably the best patient care in one that involves both as well.

Team Approach to Patient Care

At the point when a critically injured individual is trapped in the crumpled steel of a vehicle, it takes a whole team of salvage staff to spare that individual’s life. Regardless of how huge or small, every community must be ready to manage basic injury and mass casualty circumstances. This obliges cautious planning and an exact recording of resources to help guarantee patient care personnel can quickly change gears from “schedule” activity to a sudden influx of critical wounds.

Extensive city clinic crisis offices are knowledgeable in triage, needing to reliably deal with a noteworthy number of people looking for patient care, some of whom have life-debilitating diseases and wounds. A recent example in the United States was the Boston Marathon bombing. Many innocent people were injured from the blasts and numerous received treatments for wounds regularly seen just in a combat area. At this present year’s American Academy of Physician Assistants (AAPA) yearly meeting, we are blessed to have a board discourse on disaster readiness emphasizing a few PAs who staffed the Brigham and Women’s Hospital ED on that critical day in April a year ago.

PAs, in the same way as doctors and different clinicians, are ready to practice medicine when it’s required, as times of emergency. While they won’t be on the upcoming panel, the interests of PAs to venture in and quickly act throughout the Marathon bombing were as of late, covered in Runner’s World magazine. Reacting to an occurrence of mass losses is a sincerely and physically a difficult duty. The lessons that they’ve adapted all through their career have just strengthened the value of team based practice in all parts of patient care services. Throughout such staggeringly traumatic circumstances, it takes a decently composed group of doctors, Pas, attendants and other health and security work force to save many lives as possible.

Optimizing Patient Care and Safety

Rideout Health, a non-profit community-based healthcare program, and RGP Healthcare™, a department of Resources Global Professionals (NASDAQ: RECN), declared that Rideout has selected and is applying Pavisse™, a cutting-edge technology for tracking and guaranteeing individual protection. Rideout operates facilities and services located throughout Yuba, Sutter and The state of Nevada counties. They include acute-care healthcare centers Rideout Memorial and Fremont Medical Center; the Heart Center at Rideout; the Rideout Cancer Center, associated with UC Davis Medical Center; out-patient primary and specialized treatment centers and a host of additional services, such as senior living services, home health, hospice and durable healthcare equipment.

Pavisse, developed by RGP Healthcare, is a new extensive occurrence control solution designed to help healthcare centers manage individual safety, individual privacy and other compliance-related functions across the enterprise. “We will be one of the first healthcare centers in the Sacramento region to set up this software,” said Istikram Qaderi, M.D., Senior V.P. and Chief Quality Officer at Rideout. “We’ll first set up Pavisse at Rideout Memorial and once the program is running nicely, we’ll look to using it at other locations in our organization to help us continually monitor and improve the superiority of our patient care, which is always our priority.”

Dr. Qaderi, a former physician, moved his career focus recently to helping healthcare and patient care organizations work with doctors and other staff to arrange clinical care and patient-centered solutions in applications for performance improvement. He has spoken and published substantially on subjects such as quality, doctor and team engagement, safety, individual fulfillment, performance quality and culture change. Dr. Qaderi sees RGP Healthcare President Radgia Cook as an “innovator” in patient safety and incident control and further described the Pavisse product as life changing. “Pavisse is just one of several state-of-the-art tools we will use to deliver on this objective,” Dr. Qaderi said. “It is extensive, user-friendly, and easy to set up and personalized to each facility’s needs. And RGP professionals are available to help us reap the most benefit.”

Said Cook, “Rideout Health is just the type of forward-thinking partner we sought. We are thrilled about integrating with Rideout Health as they continue to serve as a national model for the delivery of quality healthcare.”