Hospital Quality Measures: Treatment And Procedures, Outcomes (Essay Sample)

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Introduction
Quality health care simply means delivering an exceptional healthcare for patients in a medical facility and this is care that is effective, safe, timely, courteous and also convenient. A hospital can measure quality in two ways which include treatment procedures and outcomes.
Treatment and procedures
This is a type of quality measure that assesses whether hospitals are using the right treatments and procedures when patients are in the hospital. Hospitals choose measures that are valid and reliable and focus on those that can be compared with data from government and other national organization in order to provide quality healthcare.
The Memorial hospital provides a broad range of health care services, including complete laboratory and X-ray facilities, an emergency room, an intensive care unit, a cardiac care unit, and a psychiatrist ward. Most of these services are provided by several other hospitals in the metropolitan area. Memorial has purposely avoided getting involved in any specialized fields of medicine or obtaining very specialized diagnostic equipment because it was felt that such services would not be cost-effective. For instance, the hospital is supposed to now collect data on the percentage of patients suffering a heart attack who were given aspirin when they arrived in the hospital (POLICY, p1-11).
Outcomes
This is a type of measure that assesses the success of the procedures and treatments given to patients in a hospital. Outcomes are however very hard to deal with in terms of measurement and analysis and this is because patients are different. Sometimes, there are not many reliable and valid measures on patients available and this is because of the vast differences among patients. For instance, an outcome measure is identified in a situation when trying to determine how many patients arrive at the hospital with a certain deadly disease and survive. Chronic diseases are a common cause of death in hospitals but when these patients are medicated at the right time this increases their chances of survival. In another example is how many patients develop an infection during treatment. Infections such as those from surgical operations can cause pain and sometimes a significant harm to the infected patient. Post-surgical infection tests are very important quality measures.
Memorial Hospital has concentrated on offering high quality general health care at an affordable price. Compared with the much larger General Hospital, Memorial stresses close personal attention to each patient from a nursing staff that cares about its work. The hospital is therefore concerned about whether the hospital can really deliver on its promises, and worries that failure to provide the level of health care patients expect could drive patients away. The total quality costs are the total of the costs incurred through many ways which include the following; first is by investing in the prevention of nonconformance to requirements, second is by appraising a service or products for conformance to the requirements and finally is y failing to meet requirements (Northwestern Memorial Hospital, 2014 p1). Some of the total quality costs that are affecting Memorial Hospital include failure costs, internal failure costs, and external failure costs. The total quality costs is the sum of the above named costs and this is the difference between actual product and service costs and what the new or reduced cost would be in Memorial if there were little or substandard services in the Hospital.
Janice is capable of picking and using various Total Quality management in Memorial hospital as this could help her boost the quality of healthcare in the hospital. This is simply because using TQM is a process that actually eliminates all defects upto zero in every area of the Memorial Hospital. This is done when the management, together with the workforce who work cooperatively in various processes, developments, hence producing the market for quality services that will satisfy the patients’ needs and expectations starting from their first time and all their subsequent visits (TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT, 2014 p1).
However, the differences present are imperative to the successful implementation of this program and its development in Memorial hospital. Janice should therefore not directly transfer TQM into this healthcare system of Memorial Hospital. She would therefore probably define the principles, techniques and philosophies that are necessary for determining the quality standards that are appropriate for the hospi...