Long Waiting Lines in Emergency Rooms and Shortage of Surgeons
Long Waiting Lines in Emergency Rooms
The quality measure is the wait time in ER and the wait time for appointments.
To improve standards, more nurses can be hired to handle emergency cases, stabilize them, process their admission, and ensure that they can wait for professional treatment. The professionals can be hired permanently, or some can be hired part-time to reduce the costs associated with having them work permanently (Tao & Liu, 2019). As a result, this will ensure that the patients can get the experts they need within a short period. This can help reduce deaths. Additionally, arrangements with other hospitals can be made to ensure that patients are referred to reliable hospitals that offer quality services (Tao & Liu, 2019). In cases when the hospital is overwhelmed, it will be possible to refer the patients and ensure that they get treated on time.
Systems to be created to help track the problem would be an information system that shows when a patient arrives in the emergency room and when a professional attends to them. The system can tell the time it takes to treat the patient; hence quality is based on serving the patients within a short time (Latifi, 2019). The reduction in the number of deaths at the emergency rooms will also be a system to monitor progress.
The financial implications would be increased costs of human resources services since more personnel would have to be hired. These individuals would have to be paid wages and eventually increase the cost of hospital services. Having information systems to monitor the flow of patients and the request for surgeons will also mean additional costs of setting up the system (Tao & Liu, 2019).
Shortage of Surgeons
The quality measure is the patient-to-surgeon ratio. If the patient-to-surgeon ratio is reduced, then the wait time before surgeries can be reduced, and this can mean quality services.
The solution to the long wait time would be to hire more surgeons and also pay the existing ones for overtime so that they can perform more surgeries. As a result, the wait time will be reduced, and this would mean improved service delivery at the hospital. If surgeons conduct more surgeries per day, it would be possible to reduce the wait time and save lives (Tao & Liu, 2019). The surgeons can also schedule appointments based on priority so that emergency surgeries are prioritized to reduce fatal outcomes.
The problem can be tracked by monitoring the wait time of the patients. Information systems can be used to estimate the wait time, and continuous reduction of patient wait time can help tell whether there is progress and that new measures in place are working (Latifi, 2019). Tracking can also be done by finding out whether the number of surgeries per day is increased. It would mean that the queue is being managed well.
The financial implication would be increased costs at the hospital, as the surgeons who work overtime would require additional compensation, and the new ones hired also would require additional salaries. The new staff to track the data would also mean that the cost of operation rises (Latifi, 2019). However, more revenues would be earned if more patients were served, and the motivation from the government to fund the hospital would lead to financial benefits.
References
Latifi, R. (2019). The modern hospital: Patients centered disease-based, research- oriented, technology-driven. Springer.
Tao, L., & Liu, J. (2019). Healthcare service management: A data-driven systems approach. Springer.