Critiquing a Change Effort in Healthcare Research Paper (Research Paper Sample)

Critiquing a Change Effort: A Case Study of UMPC Trauma Center
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UPMC Health System (formerly known as the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center), is a not-for-profit healthcare provider in western Pennsylvania, with over 2,700 physicians working in 20 hospital facilities. One of the improvement changes introduced at UPMC trauma centers is the creation of the Patient and Family Centered Care program, which is intended to inform improvements in service delivery by assessing care experiences through the eyes of patients and their families (Meter, 2011). The Patient and Family Centered Care program is an important innovation as it seeks to improve patient outcomes by allowing caregivers to better understand what patients and their families go through, and how to make these experiences more satisfying. This innovation was informed by the idea that caregivers such as nurses and families might not have sufficient knowledge of patients’ and their families’ experiences in trauma centers and what they would like caregivers to do to improve these experiences.
According to the UPMC management, the innovation has been successful in achieving its primary objective, which is to increase levels of patient satisfaction about the quality of care they receive at the hospital’s trauma centers. This satisfaction is supported by statistical data showing that 272 of the 743 for spine surgery were discharged ahead of schedule (Meyer, 2011). This outcome demonstrates that the new change helped to improve quality of care, as a result of which patient recovery rate improved.
One way that the process could have been improved is by incorporating a post-discharge follow up program to establish whether the patients...