Competing Needs in Healthcare On Healthcare Cost
Competing Needs in Healthcare On Healthcare Cost
As the healthcare sector grows, it presents significant health issues that must be addressed. Considerable improvement in healthcare is possible when issues such as leadership, technology, cost of care, and methods of service delivery are addressed. In a health facility, there are competing needs such as patient, resource, and workforce needs which affect the national policy implementation because such needs are required to align with the policy agendas. For example, a resource need such as improvement in technology will not only address the resource needs in the organization. Additionally, have an impact on the workforce in terms of technology application and patient satisfaction with the services. Implementing a policy will be difficult because the policy developed will have to address all the needs in healthcare. On patient needs such as caring for the old age for little or no pay will affect the healthcare policy development of the aged because caring for them will translate to low turnover for the facility, which might compromise the delivery of resources into the facility.
Healthcare cost is a national healthcare stressor that is greatly affected by the resources available in the healthcare system. For example, the resource needs such as acquiring modern equipment, the equipment cost might be very high, which translates into affecting the budget of the healthcare facility. New equipment bought helps address the workforce’s need for better and improved equipment that matches the current technology. Training nurses to match the latest technology increases their performance and ethical consideration (Bell, 2015). Such improvement might improve the patient value of the facility, but at the same time, the hospital might face a challenge in providing healthcare services due to the high cost, such as keeping up with the costs of the physicians.
Healthcare cost impacts both the patient, resources, and staff needs. For example, the impacts of acquiring modern equipment include improved productivity, reducing human errors, facilitating coordination, and improving practice efficiencies. At this point, the patients will benefit from enhanced technical advancement, but this might cost the workforce and reduce the available resources. The facility will spend more money to match the current workforce needs, and if this is not met, then the ethical practices of nurses might be negatively affected. A policy might address these competing needs by ensuring that the nurse staff is trained to match their skills with the new equipment bought in the facility. For example, training nurses on the modern drugs and new devices in both medical, surgical units, and outpatient services will improve patient healthcare satisfaction and workforce satisfaction. Amankwah et al. (2019) stated that a technology policy could help improve the healthcare provision of services and patient satisfaction. Therefore, with these improvements, the healthcare cost is reduced, and it will save the facility’s resources to a greater extent.
References
Amankwah, O., Choong, W. W., & Mohammed, A. H. (2019). Modelling the influence of healthcare facilities management service quality on patients satisfaction. Journal of Facilities Management.
Bell, L. (2015). Code of ethics for nurses with interpretive statements.