How does the reliability of health care services affect the quality of care you receive?
Reliability is a crucial aspect when delivering quality services. It can be defined as the ability of a system, device or process to achieve its prescribed function without failing. Notably, to achieve reliability, the system has to operate correctly in a particular environment. In the healthcare system, patients want to experience quality services that are reliable. Healthcare systems that fail to provide reliable services for a prolonged period contribute to numerous medical errors that result in 98,000 annual deaths in the U.S. (Cutler, 2014). It is important to note that although a healthcare system can achieve reliability without quality, it is impossible to achieve quality without reliability. In a reliable system, there is a collective state of mindfulness where all employees assess and report every small problem as well as unsafe condition to prevent substantial healthcare risks in the future.
What type of healthcare service do you find to be the least reliable in delivering a quality product?
In essence, inpatient services are unreliable since they are complex and highly depend on the medical decision based on a physician’s judgment on the situations. Primarily, this area is only appropriate when a doctor anticipates that a patient will need more than two nights of medical care. In most cases, a physician must order that such admission is necessary and a hospital must formally admit the patient before they receive full attention (Mohammad 2013). Due to lengthy processes, patients face complications while others die as they await.
What type do you find the most reliable?
Outpatient services are most reliable since patients work with their doctors at a personal level. In this case, patients can access timely and quality services from a specified specialist (Mosadeghrad, 2014). Outpatient services help patients and their doctors to establish a stable relationship, which always leads to open forums thus better services. Often, doctors are aware of their patient’s situations as they have been guiding them through for a long time.
References
Cutler, D. (2014). The quality cure: How focusing on health care quality can save your life and lower spending too (Vol. 9). Univ of California Press.
Mohammad Mosadeghrad, A. (2013). Healthcare service quality: Towards a broad definition. International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance, 26(3), 203-219.
Mosadeghrad, A. M. (2014). Factors influencing healthcare service quality. Int J Health Policy Manag, 3, 77-89.
