Health Policy and Promotion Week 2 Discussion

The current healthcare system is working towards improving the quality of healthcare services for desirable patient outcomes. It has been noted that this can be achieved through the application of the three major components to quality health which are the structure, process, and outcome.

Working with home health patients provides a great opportunity to incorporate all three components in improving the quality of care provided. The main goal that we share as home healthcare nurses is to optimize the level of wellbeing of individual patients, avoid hospitalization and improve functioning and independence.

Incorporating improved structure, and process at home healthcare increases the overall patient evaluation of the quality of care provided (Ellis, & Hartley, 2008). For instance, a good home healthcare structure should adopt a good ratio of the provider to patients, the process should incorporate measures that improve health, for example, providing adequate patient education and routine monitoring of patient’s conditions such as blood sugar test for diabetic patients and lastly, determine the outcome as per the employed interventions.

A good example of how these three components are applied at home health care can be illustrated by one of the patients I was taking care of, who had just been discharged from the hospital after a surgical procedure. Improved structure for this patient involved an interdisciplinary system with better communication including adequate discharge information.

The home environment was also clean and quite conducive for better care (Ellis, & Hartley, 2008). A surgical care improvement program with timely interventions such as Post-operative urinary catheter removal after 2 days, was part of the improved process. Lastly, the patient outcome was measured by observing certain aspects of post-operative care complications, such as pressure ulcers and Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infections (CAUTIs), among others. For the patient, in this case, there was no complication, indicating improved patient outcome as a result of proper structure and process applied.

References

• Ellis, J. & Hartley, C. (2008). Managing and coordinating nursing care. (5th ed.). Philadelphia, PA Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins.