Introduction
Healthcare quality can be determined using various required data collection tools and systems. To maximize the likelihood of the desired health outcomes, healthcare services must be provided in a way that is consistent with current professional knowledge and technology innovation (Rosen et al., 2018). The different types of quality care include technical quality, interpersonal quality, and amenities. Healthcare has ensured that despite the services offered to the patients, it should effectively collect data using various tools or systems to determine the quality of care offered. Health surveys and medical records are some of the tools that healthcare experts use since they are easier to collect data and analyze the quality of health care offered to individuals.
Tools Used to Gather Data Measure the Quality of Healthcare
A health survey is a tool used by healthcare workers to obtain information and data on the behavior of patients from receiving the services offered. The survey also provides feedback concerning the services patients receive from healthcare. Healthcare experts use health surveys to collect data to measure the quality of healthcare services offered to patients. These surveys are provided to collect quantitative and qualitative data on how healthcare services are provided to patients (Lynch et al., 2021). The health survey is essential because it allows healthcare professionals to understand how satisfied patients are with the services offered.
Health surveys also have advanced survey software with multi-mode capabilities that allow healthcare experts to analyze the data collected from the participants. Health experts then utilize the data to determine the quality of care administered to the patients effectively. Health surveys offered to the patients help make valuable decisions on improving care quality. They also help the patients voice their thoughts on how healthcare facilities should implement their services.
The health survey helps healthcare professionals assess the efficacy of the quality provided since they consider patients’ opinions. It helps to boost the morale of delivering quality healthcare to the patients when seeking the services since the health experts can know where to improve the quality of services. Following feedback from patients and communities, health surveys offer possibilities to enhance health management and support monitoring the standard of treatment. Health specialists can learn more about the patient’s expectations of the provided services by conducting a health survey. Health surveys help medical officials improve the patient’s experiences and adopt better ways of improving a patient-centric approach to offering quality care to the patients and communities.
Medical Records
Medical records play an important role in measuring quality health care. They provide a complete picture of a patient’s health history and can help identify trends and patterns in care. They can also be used to evaluate the effectiveness of treatments and interventions. According to Ye et al. (2019), this healthcare system helps determine the quality of healthcare provided to the patients. These records help medical experts identify the patient and effectively inspect their progress to determine the quality of the healthcare provided. When filled accurately, it provides reliable information, which helps to improve the diagnosis and treatment of patients. Through medical records, healthcare workers such as nurses and doctors can track the history and progress of the medical assistance given to the patients. It also allows patients to reflect on the quality of services offered at the health facilities.
When used as a tool for collecting data, medical records help improve the quality of healthcare services by supporting access to healthcare. It also produces better health outcomes for the patients after being diagnosed by health experts. Chen et al. (2019) argue that medical records are also used to measure the quality of healthcare services by investigating the data transparency of the patients and evaluating their experiences, as the feedback is always recorded within the patients’ documents. It also helps track the safety care provided to the patients and its effectiveness in improving their health in recovering from the diagnosed diseases. These records also give efficient medical imaging that the healthcare experts use to determine the quality of services and care given to the patients.
Medical records also help to gather data from the patients by determining how the patient improves from the diagnosed diseases within the healthcare system hence contributing to improving the quality of services offered to the patients. Medical records are an important tool that the healthcare systems use to measure the quality of healthcare services provided by measuring the effectiveness of care of patients using the records from the documents. Finally, medical records can also help to identify areas where quality improvement is needed. For example, if many medication errors are being made, this can indicate that changes need to be made to how medications are prescribed or dispensed.
Hypothetical Example
Although the occurrence of different health problems has been at an alarming rate, healthcare has not taken these problems seriously. Hence, most health problems have been reported to different healthcare systems. Therefore, the healthcare facility has been wanting to know different challenges facing its patients and if the healthcare administers adequate quality services. To carry out this process, it had to use different systems, including medical records and health surveys, to collect patient feedback. Healthcare focused on the immunization of the patients, which was the most prominent healthcare problem it faced throughout the year. Pneumonia and influenza had been diagnosed in over 20 patients, hence the need to carry out a health survey to determine if the quality of treatment offered to the patients was enough.
Therefore, healthcare used health surveys to determine the top causes of these diseases and how the patients found the healthcare services from the medical experts. It incorporated some ethical principles to ensure healthcare improved safety and patient care. The healthcare had to guarantee that they remained beneficence in carrying out the treatment of the diseases. The health experts also had to apply autonomy regarding patients’ self-determination. In treating the identified health problems, nurses had to ensure that they did not harm the patients and took care of them to build a safe space for them within the healthcare. This was important since it helped assure the patients that they were in safe places and hands. Safety is essential when giving out services as it helps to build more trust and strengthen the existing bond between the nurses and the -patients.
Application of Ethical Principles in Imparting Quality Care
Ethical principles are essential in healthcare systems since they help guide healthcare experts to keep truth and promises and help the patients effectively receive patient care and be safe at the healthcare facilities. These ethical principles help ensure that the nurses safeguard the patients by giving them quality care when handling them effectively. Applying justice is fairness as an ethical principle will be vital since it will provide health experts to conduct services with fairness when handling different patients, which will impact the quality of care to the patients (Char et al., 2018). Nurses should also ensure that they conduct beneficence services to the patients to do good and the right thing the patient, which increases the quality of services carried out by nurses to meet the quality service target.
Nurses should also ensure that they carry out nonmaleficence so that they do not cause harm to the patients, as nurses can do it intentionally or unintentionally. This helps to effectively ensure that the patients are treated in a conducive place that respects their rights, thus creating a safer place. Healthcare experts should be accountable for their actions and accept their professional duties to improve patient care quality effectively. To ensure quality care is met, nurses should also practice autonomy and treat patients with self-determination. In conclusion, healthcare experts should ensure that they accept the patients as they are and encourage them to make their own decisions without any judgments, which will help improve the quality of care.
Conclusion
Regardless of the services provided, health facilities should collect data on their quality. This is a reliable way to check the work of doctors and work out mistakes. Various methods, such as Health Surveys and Medical Records, may be used for such collection. However, improving the quality of treatment will not always contribute to patients’ comfort from an ethical point of view. For example, to improve the quality of service, such an aspect as Shared Decision Making (SDM) can be abolished. This is because the patient can rarely objectively evaluate the situation from a medical point of view and accordingly find out what is best for them. In this regard, the patient may make the wrong decision, which in the future can harm his health. However, when the patient’s right to choose is taken away, such an error is excluded since the doctor makes the decisions. From an ethical point of view, it is wrong to take away the patient’s choice, but the result will be an improvement in the quality of his treatment. Therefore, it is crucial to consider many of these factors when conducting surveys on the quality of care.
References
Char, D. S., Shah, N. H., & Magnus, D. (2018). Implementing machine learning in health care—addressing ethical challenges. The New England journal of medicine, 378(11), 981.
Chen, Y., Ding, S., Xu, Z., Zheng, H., & Yang, S. (2019). Blockchain-based medical records secure storage and medical service framework. Journal of medical systems, 43(1), 1-9.
Lynch, C. P., Cha, E. D., Mohan, S., Geoghegan, C. E., Jadczak, C. N., & Singh, K. (2021). Two-year validation and minimal clinically important difference of the Veterans RAND 12 Item Health Survey Physical Component Score in patients undergoing minimally invasive transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion. Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine, 36(5), 731-740.
Rosen, M. A., DiazGranados, D., Dietz, A. S., Benishek, L. E., Thompson, D., Pronovost, P. J., & Weaver, S. J. (2018). Teamwork in healthcare: Key discoveries enabling safer, high-quality care. American Psychologist, 73(4), 433.
Ye, C., Wang, O., Liu, M., Zheng, L., Xia, M., Hao, S.,… & Ling, X. (2019). A real-time early warning system for monitoring inpatient mortality risk: prospective study using electronic medical record data. Journal of medical Internet research, 21(7), e13719.