Health Care Economics. Terms: Quality, Resources Cost.

¶ … health care economics. Terms: Quality, resources cost. Quality, resources and costing health care The modern day health care providers are subjected to incremental pressures. They are for instance required to best respond to the changing health care issues of the contemporaneous population, to the growing demands and expectations of the stakeholders -- patients, partners, the public, governmental and non-governmental agencies and so on (Wolper, 2004) -- and to do all of this with as little resources as possible.

In other words, health care institutions are expected to maximize their output while minimizing their input. In such a context, the health care community becomes focused not only on attending to its patients at a generic level, but also on attending to the multifaceted needs of the patients and doing so in a context of limited input. In other words, an ongoing focus of the modern day heath care community is on quality, resources and cost.

The following lines explain each of the concepts in the context of the health care sector. At the most simplistic level, quality is defined as the feature of an item of being good or bad, and the degrees of its feature of good and bad (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English). Within the health care community, the quality requirements are issued by the patients, who continually ask higher levels of patient care, increased access to medical services, higher commitment on the part of the medical staff and so on.

Editors at the Institute of Medicine argue the general perception that the levels of medical care quality are inferior to those which they should be. Additionally, what is quite intriguing is that these perceptions are also obvious at the level of the medical staffs as well, not only at the patient level. "Many patients, doctors, nurses and health care leaders are concerned that the care delivered is not, essentially, the care we should receive. […] Health care today harms too frequently and routinely fails to deliver its potential benefits.

Americans should be able to count on receiving the care that meets their needs and is based on the best scientific knowledge. Yet there is strong evidence that this frequently is not the case" (Institute of Medicine). As in other field of operation, be it private or public, for profit or not for profit and so on, in order to create high quality products and services, the medical field is continually in dire need of additional resources.

The resources are generically understood as the totality of elements -- material and immaterial -- which are required in the completion of an effort. At the medical level, some of the most notable resources refer to the following: Human resources (doctors, nurses, administrative staffs) Infrastructure (buildings, but also roads and bridges on which transportation to and from the medical facilities be possible in a quick and efficient manner) Machineries and equipments, such as MRI machines, ambulances and so on Informational systems to gain quick access to patient information.

While all these resources are existent within the modern day communities -- especially in the more developed global regions -- they are not always omnipresent within the healthcare sector. And this is the result of the high costs they require. The cost basically represents the amount of money the health care organizations have to pay in order to access the resources and deliver the quality services. As the quality demands increase, the resource consumption also increases, to eventually materialize in higher operational costs for the health care agencies.

But their access to financial resources to cover these costs is often limited. Based on the nature of other revenues, the health care agencies are divided into two categories -- public institutions and private institutions. The private institutions are often credited with a wider access to financial resources as they charge for their services. Nevertheless, the actual number of people who afford to pay for private medical services is relatively reduced, meaning as such that the overall financial reserves of the private institutions are still restricted.

At the level of the public institutions, these retrieve all of their financing from the federal budgets. And the funds of the federal budget are subjected to a wide number of issues, such as delays in reimbursement for the medical services offered by the institution, or numerous socio-economic concerns which decrease the availability of funds. One.