Patient Care Model
The quality of healthcare delivered to patients by a particular organization depends on the systems used by the organization to provide health services to the patients.[1] A proper health care delivery model ensures that the team offers quality services to the patients at affordable expenses. Thus, understanding the development of a quality health care system is important for organizations to meet the patient’s satisfaction and achieve their organizational objectives, vision, and mission. This paper explains the need to switch from a total-care-delivery-model to a new patient care delivery model that helps improve the quality of care.
The Nursing Care Delivery Model and Patient Safety Goals
The new care delivery model is a health care model that helps organizations to provide quality health care services to patients at an affordable price. The model is particularly useful in situations when the organization has a limited staff size that is required to handle a large number of patients (Hill et al., 2014). The model requires the team to group the organization’s nurses into nursing units with a head nurse as the leader of the groups. The model then requires the head nurse to assign the unit members regarding specific tasks that the members will perform to a group of patients. The head nurse works as the nurse manager and all the other officers of the unit report to the head nurse. This system helps the organization to achieve the desired goals affordably without straining or increasing charges to the patient.
Apart from achieving the desired goals, the model helps the team to achieve patient safety goals such as improving the accuracy of patient identification. This model will help the team to reach this goal by promoting the use of a standardized system of identification when providing health care services to the patients (Kim et al., 2013). This step increases specificity when identifying the patients. Hence, the organization avoids possible errors related to patient misidentification. Additionally, the model helps the team achieve the goal of ensuring that there is effective communication among the caregivers in the group (Davis, 2014). For the team to reach this goal, the model makes unit nurses to timely report the diagnostic findings of clinical tests to the head nurse. This measure ensures that the organization makes a quick response to any critical health situation that requires immediate attention within a short time.
The Key Concepts
The functional model has mechanisms that help the organization to reduce the cost of the team’s expenses. First, the model identifies and defines important positions and tasks in the organization that strictly require professionals and are irreplaceable with unskilled or less trained personnel (Kim et al., 2013). Second, even where unskilled labor is required, proper training is required to ensure quality care and prepare them to work in those posts. This measure of replacing the agency’s workers with a new workforce helps the organization to reduce the cost of running the organization’s health care services. These had because unskilled workers will cost the team fewer payment charges for their services, thus explaining the reduced expenditure. Moreover, the model helps the organization to improve the quality of the health care delivery by the team. The model does this by bestowing the head nurse with the mandate of supervising the improvement of the accuracy of patients’ identification and ensuring efficient and timely communications among the caregivers (Darmont & Martin, 2013). These helps the organization to provide improved health care systems to the patients. The model guarantees an improved health care system for the organization since the head nurse is a professional who understands the required standards of a quality health care systems and how to improve it.
Supporting Evidence
The functional nursing model gives the team a chance to design systems that will reduce the cost of the organization’s health care services. For instance, the model allows the organization to use one professional nurse and several unskilled subordinate workers who work under the professional’s supervision. According to Dormont and Martin (2012), this helps the organization to save on the health services expenses since unskilled workers are affordable to the team. Therefore, the team spends less capital on the employees’ salaries and allowances.
Furthermore, the model ensures that the organization improves the quality of the organization’s health care through proper supervision. The organization’s leadership will make sure that all the subordinates provide quality services to the patients through proper guidance (Hill et al., 2014). This measure will ensure that unskilled workers in nursing units work competently under the head nurse’s supervision. Moreover, the model helps the organization to upgrade the excellence of its health care service through improving the amount of attention given to the patients. The model ensures that there are high care hours per patient day; the patient gets more time with the caregivers, which ensures maximum attention (Dubois, 2013).
Conclusion
The functional nursing care delivery model provides affordable and quality health care. This paper demonstrates the how the design saves on operational costs through the employment of unskilled staff. Besides, the paper describes how the model improves the quality of the health care services through proper supervision and the achievement of patient safety goals. These benefits make the design ideal for running healthcare organizations and improving on quality.
References
Davis, A. (2014). Core Communication Competencies in Patient-Centered Care. ABNF Journal, 40(5). Retrieved from https://www.questia.com/library/p3582/abnf-journal.
Dormont, B., & Martin, C. (2012, July).The quality of service and cost-efficiency of French nursing homes. In 9th European Conference on Health Economics (ECHE), Zurich. Retrieved from https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/5696096/9th-european-conference-on-health-eche-2012
Dubois, C. A., D’amour, D., Tchouaket, E., Clarke, S., Rivard, M., & Blais, R. (2013). Associations of patient safety outcomes with models of nursing care organization at the unit level in hospitals. International Journal for Quality in Health Care, mzt019. Retrieved from https://academic.oup.com/intqhc
Hill, Z., Dumbaugh, M., Benton, L., Källander, K., Strachan, D., ten Asbroek, A., Meek, S. (2014). Supervising community health workers in low-income countries–a review of impact and implementation issues. Global Health Action, 7. Retrieved from http://www.globalhealthaction.net/index.php/gha
Kim, J. K., Dotson, B., Thomas, S., & Nelson, K. C. (2013). Standardized patient identification and specimen labeling: A retrospective analysis on improving patient safety. Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, 68(1), 53-56. Retrieved from http://www.eblue.org/
[1] Quality healthcare can be regarded as care that is equitable, efficient, timely, patient-centered, effective, and safe. Inclusion of these factors ensures that the patient is treated based on not only available procedures but those that have been tested and proven as effective. Moreover, such care should also be readily available when needed and work efficiently based on patient diagnosis. Provision of care that is non-discriminatory ensures high levels of patient satisfaction.
