Memorial Hospital

¶ … Memorial Hospital," the hospital is privately owned and contains 600 beds for patients. It also offers a wide range of services like X-ray facilities, an intensive care unit, a cardiac care unit, an emegency room, a complete laboratory, and a psychiatric ward. The hospital has great services however, these services are offered in other healthcare facities and hospitals in the surrounding area. In order to prevent additional costs, the hospital avoided hiring specialists and providing specialized services as these additional services and medical practioners were costly.

In order to provide quality of care, the hospital places an emphasis on personal attention provided by a ursing staff to each and every, singlel patient. Patient-oriented care is there way of attracting new patients and thus have been used as the subject matter for their ads on television and in newspapers. Janice is instructed to discover a way to measure quality of care in order for the hospital to fulfill the promise they say in their ads and keep patients satisfied.

In order to measure quality of care along with customer satisfaction., appraisal costs must be taken into consideration along with implementation and awareness of continuous improvement. Continuous improvement stands to ensure no matter how good a company or organization is, it can always make improvements. This is important for the hospital and its desire to provide top quality care. Prevention costs such as employee training and quality control procedures are esential to avoid unnecessary expenditure and costly errors.

This must also be taken into account when devising the costs/expenses when improving or maintainingt quality within the hospital. Some ways the hospital could measure quality is by devising a survey/questionnaire and asking patients to rate the treatment they receive by the hospital. This is an affordable way to easily qunaitfy how well the hospital is treating its current patients. Another way is doing quick interviews with patients and asking patients to give suggestions on improving quality of care.

This will not only identify potential issues in care, but also see what positive elements are noticed by patients, avoiding unnecessary expenditure on some services or training. The potential costs may be incumbent on the value of life in the sense that if they can keep a patient alive, the hospital can gain money from the treatments paid for by the insurance companies. If quality of care is low and patients die, the result is less medical services and less money for the hospital.

The main costs of quality lie in training medical personnel and providing functioning and up-to-date tools for medical care. TQM or top quality management is a structured and comprehensive methodology meant to augment quality of services and products through continuous refinements when continuous feedback is applied/given. The four sequential categories of TQM is something Janice can offer Memorial Hosptial in order to improve quality. The four cateogies are: plan, do, check, and act or PDCA cycle.

This will help define any issues that need to be addressed, ascertain the source of the problem, and choose upon a measurement to assess effectiveness, along with confirmation of results from comparison of before-and-after information. Finally, in the acting phase, documentation of results as well as informing others about the alteration in process help in making any necessary recommendations for the issue that needed to be addressed within the cycle. Several articles help provide solutions in terms of assessing the quality of healthcare Memorial hospital provides.

For instance, addressing a person's weaknesses can help with measuring quality of care. "The findings of this study provide the managers with valuable insights into the dimensions that reflect customers' healthcare service quality perceptions. By addressing their individual weaknesses, hospitals can increase their service qualities and provide better service to patients/customers" (Buyukozkan, Cifcci & Guleryuz, 2011,p. 9407). Hospital staff for instance, may experience problems in communication which could result in diminished quality of care. Another study identified ten main obstacles in quality of care.

The authors identified ten key challenges: convincing people that there is a problem that is relevant to them; convincing them that the solution chosen is the right one; getting data collection and monitoring systems right; excess ambitions and 'projectness'; organisational cultures, capacities and contexts; tribalism and lack of staff engagement; leadership; incentivising participation and 'hard edges'; securing sustainability; and risk of unintended consequences (Dixon-Woods, McNicol & Martin, 2012, p. 1). These key challenges provide valuable insight in how to assess for problems in quality of healthcare.

Additionally, programs like HQA can assist in providing a marker for how hosptial should approach quality of care. "The Hospital Quality Alliance (HQA) program gives us the opportunity to systematically monitor the quality of hospital care nationwide" (Jha, Orav, Li & Epstein, 2007, p. 1104). There are many ways to measure and implement evaluation of quality of care within.