We are in an age when patients are aware of their health rights. They know they deserve quality health care. Quality health care has benefit to both the patient and the health care facility. Quality care is defined by six areas, that is, patient centeredness, safety, timeliness, effectiveness, equitability and efficiency. These domains are the ones that makes patients to either seek medical care in a given facility or not. They are also used to rate a health facility (Management and Strategy Institute, n.d.).
A health facility that offers quality health care has low cases of infection associate with a health facility. This means patients do not get new infections when undergoing treatment. This can be achievable by ensuring all health professionals are vaccinated against infectious diseases. The safety of patients should be given a priority. Timeliness involves giving the patient the care required at the right time. This ensures illnesses to not reach risky levels. Treatment should begin immediately a disease is detected. This will make the recovery rate of the facility to be high and as a result more patients will prefer the facility than others that has low rate of recovery.
Quality Initiatives Prevalent in Healthcare Organizations
Health care facilities strives to offer quality care. To achieve this goal, health care facilities initiates programs and activities. These activities include; reduced hospital readmissions, optimization of sepsis care, decreased medication administration errors, among others. Sepsis care refers to identification and early treatment of infections when the patient is undergoing treatment. Infection is a major cause of deaths in United States health care organization (Gagnon, 2021).
Health facilities reduces the rate of readmission by providing quality care. This is measured by the number of patients who are readmitted in the hospital while undergoing treatment and those who are readmitted after being discharged from the hospital within a month. Medical errors are reduced by use of the right tools and equipment’s, treatment of the real illness and having well qualified medical professionals. Health care organizations continuously keep training their employees on new discoveries relating to diagnosis and treatment of diseases.
Real world quality initiatives in a healthcare system
When patients narrate about their experiences with a health facility they either talk about its positive or negative aspect. The negative aspects should challenge health care professionals to act. This include coming up with ways of improvement. The notable quality initiatives include:
i. St Michaels Hospital Toronto – the HIP project
The facilities in the region used to receive elderly people with bone injuries but there was a delay in offering timely treatment. This made the patients to suffer depression, healing process took long duration and at times premature death. The team at St Joseph decided to work on its quality improvement that made surgeries to be carried out within 48 hours (Ives, 2019). This improved recovery rate and reduced adverse effects.
ii. Intermountain Healthcare, Utah – Team Based and Coordinated Care
The healthcare system uses team based approach whereby talented caregivers come together to offer the best care that translates to better outcome. This has increased efficiency, reduced costs and improved the patient compliance. In this model the care is patient centered (Mott, 2015).
