Quality Health Care Delivery

Health Care Quality Concerns
1. For the most part, the relationship between clinical quality and patient experience of care is direct. Therefore, if clinical quality is ensured, patients will typically experience quality care. Similarly, if the clinical quality of the administration of care is poor, patients will experience lower quality levels of care. The crux of this relationship is the fact that clinical quality is a causative agent in the patient care experience. It is necessary to have high levels of clinical quality in order for patients to experience quality care. The former directly impacts the latter. In several instances, notably positive patient care experiences are the outcome of commendable clinical quality.
2. Accountability plays a considerable role in the consistent delivery of the quality of care administered in healthcare settings. It is one of the means of ensuring that there is such consistency in the care delivered, because it requires healthcare personnel to be responsible for their role in issuing quality care. Without accountability there is a lack of consistency in the quality of care administered, because personnel can simply blame one another or external factors for issues they could have fixed themselves regarding care. Some of the hallmarks of a culture built on this concept include monitoring patient objectives, monitoring the impact of each professional’s involvement with patients in achieving or failing to achieve those objectives, and implementing new operational procedures based on the monitoring results. Tactics such as disseminating forms of patient feedback and inter-personnel feedback about patients’ experiences create such a culture.
3. There are some critical points of distinction between patient reports about experiences with care and patient ratings of satisfaction. For the most part, the former provides much more detail than the latter does. The information gleaned from patient ratings of satisfaction is circumscribed by the wording of those ratings. For instance, those which implement methods similar to a 7-point Likert Scale, which is fairly common for epistemological information (Capuano et al, 2016, p. 33), generally contain a statement and a few numbers with which patients can either agree or disagree with varying amounts of intensity. At best, these ratings have a small allotment in which to solicit feedback not detailed in the individual items. However, patient reports are not limited to any predefined parameters. They simply detail the most salient aspects of a particular patient’s experience. In this regard they yield much more qualitative feedback, and oftentimes contain greater quantities of such feedback than patient ratings of satisfaction do. Frequently, these reports are about some particular aspect of a patient’s experience, whereas there counterparts detail a patient’s experience in general.
4. There are multiple arguments regarding the importance of collecting feedback from patients and families about their experience with healthcare. Firstly, gathering this feedback provides unequivocal insight into the experience of the patient which is difficult to gain with other methods. It is one of the most effectual means of determining the perspective of patients and their families regarding their care. Secondly, this method is an invaluable way to improve healthcare service. By denoting what patients’ experience, providers will ascertain how to better their delivery of services. Thirdly, collecting such feedback elucidates the role individual providers had in the experience of patients. Thus, providers can learn which personnel did their jobs suitably and which did not. Lastly, collecting this feedback is a means of reinforcing accountability among such personnel.

References
Capuano, A.W., Dawson, J.D., Ramirez, M.R., Wilson, R.W., Barnes, L.L., Field, R.W. (2016). Modeling Likert scale outcomes with trend proportional odds with and without cluster data. Methodology. 12(2), 33-43.
Joshi, M. S., Ransom, E. R., Nash, D. B., & Ransom, S. B. (2014). The Healthcare Quality Book. Chicago: Health Administration Press.