Memorial Hospital Essay Samples

Provision of quality and safe health services is no doubt the dream and the first priority of every health institution and memorial hospital is no different. Memorial hospital is mandated to provide up to date quality health services and most importantly services that are affordable to its customers because failure to meet such standards may drive its customers away. Customers of a health centre may be those from outside the hospital and those within the hospital being its employees. Therefore there is a need for the memorial hospital to listen to the voice of the customers and get to know the kind of health care services they require and how they want them provided.
Memorial hospital should measure the quality of health services it provides to its customers since this will provide it with a means of comparing the set targets with the accomplished targets to determine whether it is on the right truck and whether there is need for corrections and improvement (Carman et al., 2013). The hospital can measure the quality of health services it offers through the following ways; first the hospital should perform a customer survey (Chilingerian et al., 2011). The hospital should check whether it is meeting the needs of the customers’ through health education, patient empowerment and that there is a working complaints mechanism. The customers survey gives assess of the experience of the health care and the perception of the patients and that of their families. In business, the customer is always right. This method will identify what is valued by the patients and the public and the hospital can use the survey to know whether it is providing quality services. Secondly, the hospital can measure the quality of the health services by crosschecking with outcomes it has realized and those with that it had planned to achieve (Mark et al., 2013). The outcome shows the progress made by the hospital in treatment and application of quality procedures. The hospital should monitor the number of patients who arrives at the hospital with illness and they manage to go back home feeling good and happy about the treatment they received (Carman et al., 2013). If the outcomes are positive it will mean the new quality controls methods adopted are working as planned. Thirdly, the hospital should undertake a regulatory inspection. The hospital should check whether it is complying with the clinical practices and guidelines that the quality control department had devised to be followed. For provision of quality health services, the hospital should ensure that it adheres to the legal requirements laid down. Quality health services will not be achieved if these guidelines are not followed.
The provision of quality health care is also associated with cost and failures. In process of implementation the quality control mechanism, some of the systems may not work maybe due to lack of capacity or enough resources (Mark et al., 2013). To measure this cost, there is need to measure those quality systems and facility the hospital managed to achieve or set up. The hospital will also incur the operations cost in trying to make sure that the quality health services achieved are maintained and functional. These costs include training of employees and implementation of quality control procedures. This cost will be measured by the results realized after training employees and the number of quality control procedures that the hospital has managed to implement. Lastly the hospital will incur the appraisal cost as results of implementing the quality controls as a result of hiring quality control experts and this cost can be measure by the extend in which quality control measures has been accepted and incorporated in the hospital system (Mark et al., 2013).
Memorial hospital can borrow some ideas from the TQM in providing quality health services such focusing on the customers needs (Mark et al., 2013). The hospital should strive to provide quality health services to both its outpatient and hospitalized patients. The hospital should listen to the voice of the patients to understand what the patients need and what they don’t like. The hospital will manage to do this by holding patient focus groups. Secondly the hospital should ensure that the responsibility to embrace and implement quality in its activities lie with all the hospital stakeholders (From the CEO of the hospital to the janitors) not the quality control department alone. Thirdly, the hospital should encourage group problem solving initiative. If there is a problem, the hospital should encourage its employees to work in groups as this will ensure there are divergent views and it will also promote teamwork in the work place. Additionally, the hospital should train its employees on emerging trends in the field of medicine. The field of medicine changes every day (Kania et al., 2013). New practices, health care plan, procedures and guidelines are being devised every day that passes by and there is need for the hospital to continually train its workers to make sure that they are updated with the current trends. Finally, there is need for the hospital to undertake benchmarking (Mark et al., 2013). The hospital should compare its performance with that of its competitors or even with the hospital that is recognized in the region to offer quality health services to set its standards.
Conclusively, there are some methods that the hospital can use to asses the quality of health care it is providing; the hospital should asses whether their services are reliable, that is, whether they are proving the services accurately, on time and that they address the patients needs. Secondly, the hospital should also check on how its employees are responsive and willing to meet the patients and their family needs. Additionally, the quality of service delivery can be assessed by the knowledge and courtesy of its employees and their ability to show trust in their work. Lastly, quality can be assessed by the level of tangible materials it has to enable it to offer quality services to its customers. The equipments should be of good quality and up to date.

Reference

Carman, K. L., Dardess, P., Maurer, M., Sofaer, S., Adams, K., Bechtel, C., & Sweeney, J. (2013). Patient and family engagement: a framework for understanding the elements and developing interventions and policies. Health Affairs, 32(2), 223-231.
Chilingerian, J. A., & Sherman, H. D. (2011). Health-care applications: from hospitals to physicians, from productive efficiency to quality frontiers. InHandbook on data envelopment analysis (pp. 445-493). Springer US.
Kania, J., & Kramer, M. (2013). Embracing emergence: How collective impact addresses complexity. Blog entry, January, 21.
Mark A. Vonderembse, & Gregory P. White. (2013). Operations Management. 13500 Evening Creek Drive North, Suite 600, San Diego, CA 92128.: Bridgepoint Education, Inc.
World Health Organization. (2003). How can hospital performance be measured and monitored? Retrieved from http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/74718/E82975.pdf