Assignment Instructions
Imagine that you are a hospital administrator at the Sunlight Hospital in California. The main complaint among the patients is the quality of care. Your job is to understand the state of the hospital, create value, increase efficiency, and turn the facility into a local hospital of choice. Whenever you are making visits in various wards to meet the employees and the patients, you hear how the patients love the hospital, but they would like to see certain improvements in care. The employees seem to be very busy executing their duties and not interacting much with the patients. The hospital board has asked you to compile a report of your findings and suggested strategy for achieving the hospital’s current goals.
Note: You may create and / or make all necessary assumptions needed for the completion of this assignment.
Write a four to six (4-6) page paper in which you:
- Classify five (5) measurements of quality of care in a hospital, and justify the major reasons why you believe these measurements matter to patients in their process of choosing a hospital for emergency or inpatient care.
- Specify four (4) main features in health care organizations that can be used to design a successful quality improvement plan. Articulate the significant manner in which the specified features can lead to failure or success of quality of care in Sunlight Hospital.
- Suggest the salient reasons why quality of care would add value to and create a competitive advantage for the Sunlight Hospital. Justify your response.
- Use four (4) recent (within the last five [5] years) quality academic resources in this assignment.
Note: Wikipedia and other websites do not qualify as quality academic resources.
Management of Health Care Quality – Sunlight Hospital in California Scenario – Sample Answer
Measurement of quality of care in a hospital
There is inevitable need for the Sunlight Hospital to improve the quality of care within its scope of healthcare services provision. This is due to the fact that the hospital has set goals and strategies to ensure that the patients get the best of services and treatment from the hospital. This paper gives insights of the various measurement s of quality of care in the hospital and then giving a justification for the reasons why the measurements contributes significantly to the choice of a patient on a hospital of preference in case of emergency or inpatient care.
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Supportive Administrative Leadership
This measurement of quality of care of the hospital healthcare services ensure that he organization’s leadership team, that is, board of trustees , top-level administration, and medical staff leadership, shares the urgency to quality approach practices and there is will and ability to provision of complete and a vibrant ongoing support towards the success of this initiative (Nordenfelt, 2012). There is greater need for both the top-level administration and even those at the bedside to accord much support in facilitation of the quality improvement initiatives.
Making the case over effective leadership in achieving healthcare quality, is essential to question how support for the quality improvement programs fit with the facility’s commitments and values. From the onset getting to know exactly the kind of leadership support the whole quality improvement initiative should be accorded but it is known that the changes would require new or reallocated resources, probably both the human and material resources. The quality changes will require accountability and focus for the results, which obviously calls for the senior leadership oversight.
In case of failure for the uphold such strong leadership attributes in ensuring achievement of quality of healthcare services, the impact and damage may of greater magnitude to measure. This would cause low turnout of patients seeking the hospital’s services, raising costs of the hospital each year in terms additional staff time, longer lengths of stay, increase in pain and functional impairment (Carey & Lloyd, 2001).
Urgency to quality
This aspect of measurement questions why it is necessary to improve the quality of the care services, and do the hospital members find the need for quality a compelling factor (Lloyd, 2014). In case where the urgency does not exist yet among the members and the leaders, the job of a determined change agent is to create or increase the urgency. At this stage, the focus leans on the urgency at the organization level.
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Inpatient Quality Indicators
These measures reflect the quality of care within the hospital and entails the inpatient mortality; utilization of procedures in which the questions raises include; underuse, overuse, or misuse; and the great number of procedures for there is evidence that a greater volume of procedures is associated with lower mortality.
The quality strategy
The Quality Initiative formulates a multi-pronged approach in support, provision of incentives and driving the systems and facilities which include professionals and clinicians working within the hospital settings with motive of ensuring superior care through the currently on-going enforcement and regulation undertaken by state survey agencies.
Collaboration and partnership
Towards achieving of effectiveness as a result of the Hospital Quality Initiative there must be truly a collaborative effort within the hospitals and their associations, clinicians, physicians, federal and state agencies, private purchasers, independent health care quality organizations, consumer advocates and accrediting organization. This initiative is structure to ensure improvement in the communications among the various parties to positively impact on the quality of care. By collaboration to expand the base of resources and knowledge, every partner can achieve more and immediate improvements in the quality of the healthcare facility (Carey & Lloyd, 2001). This cooperative effort in the Hospital Quality Initiative creates an increased level of understanding and higher quality attainment in ensuring patients gets the best from personal efforts and also from an aided effort as the quality of services advance within the settings of the hospital.
Features of healthcare organizations in designing quality improvement plan
Consumer information on Quality of Care
According to Lloyd (2014), the designing of a successful quality improvement plan involves conducting an integrated communications campaign which encourages the consumers and the physicians in the discussions and making informed decisions on how to attain the best hospital care. This feature encourages patients to have access of the hospital’s quality information from several platforms, for instance, websites, brochures, fliers, magazines among other media.
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There will be promotion of awareness, understanding and usage of quality measures through engagement with the clinicians and the intermediaries–these include community organizations, primary care physician and the media. The Sunlight Hospital should exploit on such a feature of appropriate information of the quality issue within its healthcare unit.
Rewards for superior performance
This particular feature stipulates explicitly how the healthcare facility strategize towards ensuring that the employees are motivated by being rewarded for exemplary performance. This initiative makes the hospital to explore Pay-for- performance through the Premier Hospital Incentive Demonstration. Within the framework of the demonstration, the hospitals receive bonuses based on their quality performance measures selected for inpatients with given clinical conditions: heart failure, pneumonia, heart attack, hip and knee replacements and coronary artery bypass graft. Hospital will be scoring on the quality measures related to every condition that is measured.
Enforcement and regulation features
The continuous conduct of enforcement and regulation activities is a feature which ensures that Medicare hospitals are incompliance with the federal standards for patient safety and health and quality of care. The certification and survey program becomes a joint effort of the state government and the federal government towards ensuring that there is safety and improvement in the quality of care within the health care facilities. The survey and certification activities provide an important perspective for the quality of care in hospitals ((Carey & Lloyd, 2001).). Sunlight Hospital should be also regulate and an undertaking of legal enforcement taken to ensure that the standards set to uphold quality of care is held at par.
Outcome measures
This feature entails considerations that outcomes are important measures towards the quality and success of patient care. These measures include readmission, mortality, resource consumption, satisfaction with care, and health status. The ever pressing form of limitation with the use of outcomes as the makers of care quality is lack of suitable risk-stratification models.
Even though, the appropriate use of outcome measures ensures that a better quality of care can be formulated. There is great logistics challenges involved in the collection of such information. The outcome measures should be done by clinicians and then used for the hospital’s internal quality improvement plans. The outcome measures results collected over time is used in identification of the potential opportunities with an aim of improving care.
The quality of care in Sunlight Hospital can be improved when the information on outcomes measure are appropriately collected and viable solution deductions are made from the data on how to improve the quality of the hospital’s services.
Significance of quality health care services
Integration of performance measurement systems
An examined position on how the external mechanisms for the measurement of the hospital’s performance shows a significant contribution to internal development and the public accountability. The development attained within the healthcare facility as a result of quality improvement forges a competitive edge within the industry as the aspects of accountability holds to a greater extent.
Public disclosure of the hospital performance
When the standards of the healthcare services holds the highest level of quality, such information are easily available within the public domain (Carey & Lloyd, 2001). The publications of the hospitals results and activities are done with an aim to encourage the improvement of quality of service delivery, empowering patient’s choice and therefore demonstrate a commitment to industry transparency. This becomes significant as it increases public interest and attention to the management of data quality
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