Ways To Increase Consumer Participation In Healthcare | Strategies For Improving Patient Outcomes

Consumer Participation in Healthcare

Question:

How Can I Increase Consumer Participation In The Healthcare?

There are many ways by which consumers can play an active role in improvement of the healthcare services. As defined by Happell et al. (2015), the consumer participation is considered as the structural as well as political attempts to improve the health scenario of the country. The following are the two ways the patients can actively participate in the health care delivery process-

Consumers should be made a part of the healthcare delivery process and they should be involved in the process of decision-making. It is argued that the consumers have great potential in influencing the health outcomes if they are included in the decision making activity. The decision making activity of the patients and their family members would be possible only with the help of sharing of quality information and the use of suitable self-management tools (Légaré & Witteman, 2013).

Patients should be well-aware about the surgical procedures or any other clinical treatments that they would be undertaking or their family members would be undergoing. If the patients have more participation in the communication process, then there would be an improvement in the health care delivery outcomes.

I am a registered nurse and there are ways of improving the participation of the consumers in the planning, evaluation and the implementation of the health care delivery. I should try to involve more number of patient families in the event of chronic diseases. This would enable a better health intervention of the chronic ailment patients, who needs not only our care but the concern of their family member is also important. I should also try to educate the patient families regarding the type of ailments that are being faced by them. I need to tell them that the specialty, social status and the ethnic origin are responsible for enhancing the patient care outcomes. The patients should be treated well and they should be more aware of the different kinds of medications that I inject to them. I should engage in more patient education as the patients need to be aware of the different consequences of the clinical treatment. I should be informing the patient parties about the complications of the patients and the medical procedures. I am also keen to ask for the feedbacks of the patients.

The aim of the National Safety and Quality health services aims to protect the general public from any subsequent harm and improve the level of the health service provision (Safetyandquality.gov.au, 2017). One of the standards includes the prevention and control of the healthcare associated infections (Middleton et al., 2013). The aim of this standard is to prevent the patients from hospital acquired infections and treat such infection if they occur in the patients. This is done by the evidence based strategies. The patients acquiring infection should be identified promptly and they should be given necessary treatment.  

Strategies to Reduce Hospital-acquired Infections

The potential outcome of not adhering to the best practice would lead to high number of patients that would be affected by the hospital or healthcare related information. There would be greater acquiring of the hospital infections such as fungal pathogens, bacterial pathogens, pneumonia, bloodstream infections and surgical site infections (Yokoe et al., 2014).This would affect patient outcomes as more number of patients would be having a difficult time to recover.

I am a registered nurse and I would implement two standards for improving the patient outcomes concerning hospital acquired infections. I would implement two strategies to reduce the instances of the hospital acquired infections-

First, I would develop, implement as well as audit hand hygiene program that would be aligned with the national initiative of hand hygiene. This would be done on the basis of the workplace compliance with all the organizational hand wash guidelines. I would also like to look after the compliance rates from the different hand hygiene audits. I need to also address the non-compliance.

Second, I would like to develop as well as implement the management of the invasive devise usage which would be effective in controlling of the infection in the various health care centers. I would also like to develop a competency based training and deliver them regularly in my hospital

Nurses are important part in the process of delivery of healthcare process. The leadership skills among the nurses are important for achieving higher level of success in terms of cost efficiency and patient outcomes (Frankel & PGCMS, 2017). The nurse leaders are expected to find ways of getting them involved in the decision-making of the firm. The nurses’ leadership capabilities have direct impact on workforce planning and the development of suitable workplace policies.

One of the most important leadership skills of the nurses includes the mentorship activities. The senior nurses should involve in empowering their junior team members and focus on the importance of the nursing role. The mentorship should be a structured one and they should be task specific instead of normal training. The senior nurses must ensure that the juniors have their right to seek proper information and there should be proper exchange of the useful knowledge (Reem, Kitsantas & Maddox, 2014). The aim of the mentorship is to create supportive a stable work environment that would encourage professional growth. It is also important to implement role modeling in which the less experienced nurses would be gaining experience from the more experienced ones.

Improving Nurse Leadership Skills

The nurses should also strive their nursing team to have better outcomes for patient care. The good leaders are expected to give encouragement to the junior staff so that they can gain a better understanding of the patient needs (Grossman & Valiga, 2016). It is important for the senior leaders to identify their roles and optimize the patient outcomes.

I think I should develop myself as a better mentor as the empowered nurses to enhance their commitment to the organizational goals.  I should try to enhance my coaching capabilities and should encourage that the senior nurses should take care of this activity for around 15-30 minutes every day. I should try to complete a daily log, in which there would be proper documentation of the mentorship task. It is also important to understand the strengths as well as weakness in the performance of all the activities. I should also try to determine the future goals of my team, which would help me to mentor well.

The organizational culture is the characteristics that distinguish the company from the competitors as well as capitalize on the different opportunities presented by them. The organizational leaders should be able to create an enriching culture in which there is sufficient scope of improvement (Alvesson, 2016). There are several characteristics of a learning culture in the organizations, which are discussed below-

• Encouragement of creative thinking- The learning is usually fostered by the “out of the box” techniques and this promotes learning to all the team members.
• Good communication-
• Foster team learning- It is important that life-long learning culture is created with the process of creation of strong values. In a learning culture the team development is given utmost importance.
• Encouragement of experimentation- Learning can only be possible only if the employees are allowed to permit little bit of experimentation in their day to day work activities.
• Top management support- In such kind of organizational culture, the top management is responsible for initiative and is more involved in the organizational decisions. They are more flexible in nature and they listen to their employees in either active or passive manner.

I am a registered nurse and it is my duty to enhance the learning culture in the organization. I have decided that I should implement two ways of fostering good learning culture in organizations-

• Formulate training and development plans- It is important to formalize training plans in the organization that would foster a good learning culture (Stokke et al., 2014). There should be proper implementation of the training modules, which would be most effective for the organizations (Milne, 2015). The training modules would enhance the overall skills and expertise of the employees, which would help them to perform in a better manner.
• Initiate internal promotion- The environment of the learning and development would lead to greater promotion in the organizational domain. The greater level of promotion in the organization would lead to greater learning culture in the organization.

The concept of role conflict is defined as the situation in which the person is being expected to play different incompatible roles is known as role conflict (Schmidt et al., 2014). This kind of conflict occurs when there are incompatible set of demands that are being placed on the person. There can be intra-role conflict where there are demands placed within a single domain of the life. There are different kinds of conflicts that take place in a healthcare setting (Greenglass & Burke, 2016). There can also be conflicts arising from the individual personality features.

The role conflict has an effect on the functioning of a nurse in a healthcare scenario. The nurses may not be able to adhere to the patient care guidelines if there are conflicts in between the team (Fiabane et al., 2013). The high level of conflicts would lead to an increase in the employee demotivation, which would decrease the performance of the nurses. If the employees have low morale, then they would not be able to serve the patients in a better way. This would subsequently decrease the patient satisfaction rates, which would not be good from the organizational point of view. It would imply a subsequent reduction in the revenue generation of the hospital or the healthcare entity.

Fostering a Learning Culture

I should adopt two self-care strategies that would help in the physical and emotional well being of myself. I should be aware about the fact that it is important to build amicable relationships with all the medical team members of the hospital. It is also advisable to build good rapport with the administrative staffs of the hospital so that the overall patient care can be enhanced. I should also keep in mind the fact that I need to go frequent trainings, which would enhance my performance. If the employees are being given more number of skills and expertise, then they would be happy in the workplace. I need to focus on reducing the level of conflicts in the organization and should try to improve the interpersonal relationships. I should try to focus on the various aspects of the interpersonal relationships in the organization and should try to improve them as much as possible.

References

Alvesson, M. (Ed.). (2016). Organizational culture. Sage.

Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care. (2017). Safetyandquality.gov.au. Retrieved 12 September 2017, from https://www.safetyandquality.gov.au

Fiabane, E., Giorgi, I., Sguazzin, C., & Argentero, P. (2013). Work engagement and occupational stress in nurses and other healthcare workers: the role of organisational and personal factors. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 22(17-18), 2614-2624.

Frankel, A., & PGCMS, R. (2017). What leadership styles should senior nurses develop?. Heart failure, 11, 29.

Greenglass, E. R., & Burke, R. J. (2016). Stress and the effects of hospital restructuring in nurses. Canadian Journal of Nursing Research Archive, 33(2).

Grossman, S., & Valiga, T. M. (2016). The new leadership challenge: Creating the future of nursing. FA Davis.

Happell, B., Platania?Phung, C., Byrne, L., Wynaden, D., Martin, G., & Harris, S. (2015). Consumer participation in nurse education: A national survey of Australian universities. International journal of mental health nursing, 24(2), 95-103.

Légaré, F., & Witteman, H. O. (2013). Shared decision making: examining key elements and barriers to adoption into routine clinical practice. Health affairs, 32(2), 276-284.

Middleton, B., Bloomrosen, M., Dente, M. A., Hashmat, B., Koppel, R., Overhage, J. M., … & Zhang, J. (2013). Enhancing patient safety and quality of care by improving the usability of electronic health record systems: recommendations from AMIA. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 20(e1), e2-e8.

Milne, D. (2015). Training Behaviour Therapists (Psychology Revivals): Methods, Evaluation and Implementation with Parents, Nurses and Teachers. Routledge.

Reem, A. D., Kitsantas, P., & Maddox, P. J. (2014). The impact of residency programs on new nurse graduates’ clinical decision-making and leadership skills: A systematic review. Nurse Education Today, 34(6), 1024-1028.

Schmidt, S., Roesler, U., Kusserow, T., & Rau, R. (2014). Uncertainty in the workplace: Examining role ambiguity and role conflict, and their link to depression—a meta-analysis. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 23(1), 91-106.

Stokke, K., Olsen, N. R., Espehaug, B., & Nortvedt, M. W. (2014). Evidence based practice beliefs and implementation among nurses: A cross-sectional study. BMC nursing, 13(1), 8.

Yokoe, D. S., Anderson, D. J., Berenholtz, S. M., Calfee, D. P., Dubberke, E. R., Ellingson, K. D., … & Lo, E. (2014). A compendium of strategies to prevent healthcare-associated infections in acute care hospitals: 2014 updates. American journal of infection control, 42(8), 820-828.