The overall goal of this article is to provide ways and strategies to improve the quality of healthcare for the world during and after the COVID-19 pandemic and seeking to improve the quality of health services.
Improving healthcare quality can be viewed at all levels as a macro and a micro-level, that will require sweeping, systemic change of the entire healthcare system, and as something that individual physicians can practice for their patients.
Keeping in mind the COVID-19 pandemic, the governments will need to make difficult decisions to maintain the health requirements of communities and engaging in strategic planning and coordinated action to maintain essential health service delivery as well.
Failure Factors for Health Care Services
According to the Journal of Family and Community Medicine, Communities and Health systems are continuously in fighting with the transferable and non-transferable pandemics, diseases, and also with the increasing burden of emerging and re-emerging diseases such as drug-resistant TB, malaria, SARS, H1N1, and the current COVID-19 pandemic).
One of the primary factors is that most of the people and communities are unaware of personal protective equipment and their proper use, some are not getting or getting a limited supply of these Personal Protective Equipment’s (PPE). Moreover, improper way of discarding is also an essential factor of failure.
The causes of health inequalities lie within society due to the social, economic, and political mechanisms. The world acknowledged the lack of adequate progress on these underlying social determinants of health as a glaring failure of public health.
According to the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) report, Patients and communities suffer harm because of three different types of quality reasons.
- Firstly, when patients do not get beneficial and quality health services.
- The second happens when patients do not get the quality and beneficial treatments or procedures.
- The third occurs when patients receive appropriate quality medical services, but those services are provided badly by exposing patients to the risk of preventable complications.
None of these issues and factors are simple to address, but you can solve them by adopting the simple strategies mentioned below. You can implement these strategies during and after the Corona pandemic in your healthcare centers.
3 Strategies For Quality Improvement During The COVID-19
Under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommendations, Here we are providing you 3 primary practical approaches and strategies healthcare systems can operate effectively during the COVID-19 pandemic to protect healthcare personnel (HCP), patients, and communities.
Strategy 1: Ensure The Use of Personal Protective Equipment
Understand and execute current infection, prevention, and control (IPC) practices for the recent global disaster.
- Ensure the training of HCPs on the use of personal protective equipment (PPE) such as face masks, disposable gloves, hand sanitizers, etc.
- Implement strategies to enhance the use of personal protective equipment (PPE) such as extending the use of PPE units where only patients with COVID-19 are provided care and implementing a walk-up testing booth.
- Develop protocols for HCP to monitor themselves for fever and symptoms of the coronavirus.
Strategy 2: Implement the extended use of facemasks
Make sure to implement the extended use of facemasks within the health care centers by the primary health providers and the patients as well. Continue the practice of wearing the same facemask for repeated close contact encounters with several different patients, without removing the facemask between patient encounters.
- It is compulsory to remove and discard the soiled, damaged, or hard to breathe through face masks.
- HCP must take care not to touch their facemask. It is necessary to perform proper hand hygiene in case of touching the face mask.
- It HCP requires to remove the facemask, make sure to leave the patient care area.
Strategy 3: Designate convalescent HCP for the care of COVID-19 patients
Make some regulations possible to designate the HCP, clinically recovered from the coronavirus to preferentially provide care for additional patients with the same virus. They had developed some protective immunity to fight against the virus.
3 Strategies For Quality Improvement of Health Services
Here are the 3 simple ways which primary care providers can take right now to improve quality healthcare for their patients:
Strategy 1: Collect Data and Analyze Patient’s Health and Outcomes
The first step to improve the quality of health care at any organization is to analyze the patient’s history or existing data to understand where opportunities exist. Managing requires examination.
It is necessary to analyze both your patient population and your organizational operations to identify areas that need to be improved. Then, you can use the following examined data of a patient to establish a baseline for outcomes.
If you want to improve the quality of health in your organization, Electronic Health Records (EHRs) will provide you the starting point to fulfill this promise of improvement.
Use these EHRs, outcomes studies, patient satisfaction surveys, and other data sources to closely monitor the health, outcomes, overall wellness, and costs for individual patients to improve and maintain the quality of health systems.
Strategy 2: Improve Access to Care
Having access to care is the most significant factor in improving the healthcare system and patient outcomes. The organization must provide patients access to the right care at the right time to get the right results and to enhance the quality health care system.
Improving access to care doesn’t only refer the patients to visit their primary care physician regularly but use preventive healthcare services such as early detection screenings as soon as possible.
Read Also: Global Battle against the Coronavirus
According to Deloitte’s recent report, The Future of Health 2040, the healthcare industry is on the edge of a serious disruption driven by greater connectivity, interoperable data, open platforms, and consumer-focused care.
Strategy 3: Connect and Collaborate with Other Organizations
Therefore, it is necessary for the healthcare organizations that truly want to improve their quality of health and care should regularly research and learn from other organizations both within their region and across the country.
Reach out to the identified organizations within the city and find out what you can learn from them. After visiting others, In addition to implementing changes in your organization, you can also collaborate with other health care units and organizations to improve patient outcomes and services as well.
Primary care providers are a unique set of people in the organization to engage and connect patients with additional services. In other words, primary carers are the best positioning medical staff to take responsibility for every single patient both inside and outside the hospital.
Conclusion
Improvements such as these can in turn provide the investment necessary to broaden and deepen the quality improvement program for health. Moreover, extending these strategies to projects that may be concerned with the revenue, cost, and eventually including projects that may increase the cost (or decrease revenue) to achieve the desired health quality benefit.
Finally, prominent quality improvement strategies during and after the Corona pandemic with well-documented results might lead to the purchasers or consumers to give a higher priority on quality than they do now and thereby create a marketplace edge for the organization.
