Healthcare services are changing in the modern scenario. The society expects high quality care and services from the sector. This has increased the pressure by office administrator and healthcare practitioners to ensure that patients are given the required care without compromise. In order for this to be a reality, it is imperative for the human resource administrator to encourage effective performance and quality healthcare from the staff. This is a crucial requirement in the efforts to avoid malpractices, which are detrimental for healthcare providers and hospitals. This requires constant appraisals in order to ensure that the hospital staff is providing the required care, and that patients are satisfied. This requires the human resource to ensure that there are tools in place to assess healthcare quality in order to avoid the risk of malpractice litigation.
Several factors impeded the provision of quality health care. These factors can lead to the risk of litigation injury, duty breach and causation. The faith of patients in the healthcare system is affected negatively when costs increase and quality are compromised (Chandra, Durand & Dickens, 2009). Despite the reality of malpractices in healthcare, there is no equitable rate for liability insurance in the U.S. In addition, the exposure of medical practitioners has had a negative effect on service delivery due to defensive medicine (Pickett, 2009). According to statistics, 42% of public members and 35% of physicians have reported error cases (Chandra, Durand & Dickens, 2009). Despite this, 6 percent of the public and 5 percent of physicians think that errors are a serious problem. This shows the attitude towards errors by the stakeholders in the medical sector. This increases the risk of medical practitioners to malpractice litigation in the long term. Some of the factors that contribute to medical errors include the following. According to physicians, understaffing of nurses and a stressed, fatigued and overworked staff are some of the key factors leading to medical errors. Patients cite overworked physicians and lack of adequate time spent by physicians on patients as some of the reasons for medical errors. The public also cited understaffing and lack of teamwork as other factors leading to errors. It is evident from these sentiments that medical practitioners can be protected from litigation liabilities by effective human resource practices.
In order to ensure that factors causing medical errors are mitigated, it is crucial to design an effective strategy to assess health care quality in the institution. In order to achieve this, individual physicians will be assigned nurses. This will ensure that there is a close association between the two factions. This is crucial for evaluation since it will encourage the physicians to encourage nursing assistants to provide quality care (Shi, 2010). Considering that this approach has the challenge of commitment from the physicians, a team-based approach will also be used to evaluate the quality of care. This will encourage teamwork and will provide a realistic and effective approach of appraising the quality of care by individuals in a team setting. Team members will be encouraged to rate their colleagues. This will ensure that all individuals in the medical practice do not abscond from their duties and perform exemplarily (Shi, 2010). The individuals in the team will be held accountable for their mandates ensuring that service delivery and quality are prioritized.
Quality health care is crucial for patient satisfaction. Several factors impede the delivery of quality care in a healthcare setting. Despite this, the human resource can be proactive in the efforts to ensure quality care. This will require effective appraisal services in order to guarantee quality healthcare for patients. This reduces the risk of medical errors and litigation by ensuring customer satisfaction.
References
Chandra, A., Durand, R., & Dickens, K. (2009). Healthcare Consumers' Beliefs about Medical
Malpractice Lawsuits. Hospital Topics, 87(2): 25-32.
Pickett, K. (2009). Malpractice Reform.Time, 174(12), 16.
Shi, L. (2010). Managing Human Resources in Health Care Organizations. Jones &
Bartlett
