Quality_of_Care

Policy Topic Search and Selection (Quality of Care) Maya Bynes HCS/455 June 2, 2010 Instructor: Robbya Green-Weir Quality of Care In this paper I will define quality of care and provide information about the uninsured as it pertains to the quality of care. Quality of care is effective and efficient services that are rendered to patients in the health care field. Quality can be in the form of patient safety, patient satisfaction and patient assurance. Quality of care includes training of health care personnel, improving delivery system processes, and attention to systemic level factors such as technology and medical records. Patient safety in health care is making sure that products are clean, safe to use and staff are using them correctly. Quality assurance in the health care field has intensified because of the concern that health care is costly, may sometimes be dispensed inappropriately and inequitably, and varies unduly among physicians and locations. For the medical profession quality assurance is seen as an important means not only to demonstrate that physicians meet universal standards of competence and that the safety of the public is not compromised, but also to identify physicians' educational needs. (CMAJ, 1992) Potential deficiencies in the knowledge, skills and attitudes of physicians can affect the outcome of quality given to patients. That is why it is important patients ask questions to make sure they are receiving adequate care. Some questions to ask are; Does your health care fits your needs and preferences, is your health care is given without unnecessary delays, and is your health care fair and not affected by such things as your gender, language, color, age or income. Quality of care is important to all patients but in recent studies uninsured people are more likely to receive poor care from health facilities. (Checkpoint, 2004) Health care access for the poor and uninsured in the U.S. is an increasingly complex problem. From 2000 to 2005 the number of uninsured persons rose from 39.6 to 46.6 million while hundreds of hospital emergency rooms, the primary source of healthcare for many of the uninsured, were closed. The sorting of underinsured patients to lower quality physicians may occur at the physician level or at the hospital level. The reasons for physicians to discriminate against uninsured patients are widely known. Physicians receive payments from Medicare, Medicaid, and privately insured companies, yet payment from uninsured patients is not guaranteed. (Gardner and Vishwasrao, 2007) So in my research I found that uninsured patients in the United States are not receiving quality care from physicians and some hospitals. As the problem continues we need to find more accessible health care for all and treat every with the same quality of care. In conclusion I have defined quality of care in health care I also provided information about the uninsured as it pertains to the quality of care. References: Checkpoint (2004) What is Quality care retrieved June 2, 2010 from http://www.wicheckpoint.org/WhatQualityHealthCare.aspx CMAJ (1992) Quality of care: What is quality and how can it be measured' Health Services Research Group v146 (12): 2153–2158 retrieved June 2, 2010 from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1492299/'page=1 Gardner L and Vishwasrao S (2007) Physician Quality and Health Care for the Poor and Uninsured retrieved June 2, 2010 from http://home.fau.edu/svishwas/web/Physician%20Quality%20and%20Outcomes2.pdf