Health Care At A Healthcare Facility Essay

When a person becomes a patient at a healthcare facility, especially in an Emergency Department, the patient will meet a lot of healthcare staff that will briefly introduce themselves and will proceed to invade the patient ‘s personal space within a few minutes. The patient will be bombarded by numerous questions, instructions, and explanation while not being able to control any of the activities around him/her. The patient may also be instructed undress and change into a hospital gown. With all these activities, the patient may feel overwhelmed, frightened and stressed about the situation s/he is in. While the patient is in this condition, a nurse, or any other medical staff, in order to solicit a response and gain the patient ‘s cooperation must be able to build a therapeutic relationship with the patient. In doing so, the staff will need to address the patient ‘s physical and emotional needs.
To address the patient ‘s need and gain the patient ‘s cooperation, medical workers, while in medical school, are familiarized to the practice of therapeutic communication. According to Mosby ‘s Dictionary of Medicine, Nursing & Health Professions (2012), therapeutic communication is a technique where healthcare workers, using specific strategies to convey trust, respect, and acceptance using verbal and nonverbal methods, knowingly influences their patient to express their feelings and ideas. These specific strategies include gaining the patient ‘s trust, showing genuine interest in the patient, displaying empathy towards the patient, accepting and respecting the patient, and displaying self-awareness.Health Care At A Healthcare Facility Essay

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Research the websites of two competitors and assess the effectiveness of their online presence. Identify specific areas where those websites are superior to yours whether in form or function. Also identify areas where your own website is superior.

In searching the Web for the only two competitors in the community in which our organization serves, it was interesting to learn that neither had a website. When searching for Desoto Healthcare Center website, web-surfers are led to a blue page that flashes the message “This site is currently under construction…” (desotohealth.com. 2013). This for profit nursing home, located nearest the only Hospital in the community, is a 120-bed center with no apparent online presence. Health Care At A Healthcare Facility Essay
Identify a journal or publication specific to your industry. Evaluate the overall value that reading such a journal brings to your knowledge of your organization’s performance. In reading the Long Term Living publication I learned valuable information about the performance of my organization. While reading an article on the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services I discovered clarification on new guidelines to laundry regulations for nursing facilities. These guidelines have not yet been implemented in my facility and failure to do so would result in receiving an F tag on the Annual State Survey (Pamela Tabar, 2013). My continued reading introduced me to new products on the market that would allow for better monitoring of the residents and patients in our care.

This is a time of enormous investment in new health-care buildings. The UK plans to create upwards of a hundred hospitals and thousands of primary-care clinics and surgery centres. In the USA, more than $200 billion will be spent on new hospitals over the next decade. This wave of construction provides an opportunity to create better buildings by use of the emerging science of evidence-based design, in which the design process is guided by an empirical understanding of the eff ects of health-care physical environments on safety, effi ciency, and clinical outcomes. The scientifi c foundation for evidence-based health-care design is already large and surprisingly strong. A joint project at Texas A&M University and the Georgia Institute of Technology in the USA identifi ed nearly 700 rigorous studies, most published in international medical journals, about how the architecture of acute-care hospitals aff ects health. A collaborative of more than 30 health-care organisations set up by the Center for Health Design has done several multi-year clinical and safety evaluations of specifi c design interventions and new buildings. Much credible evidence now shows that good design of a hospital’s physical environment promotes better clinical outcomes, increases safety, and reduces stress for both patients and staff . Research internationally has shown that hospital noise levels are far too high, with decibel intensities greatly exceeding guideline values such as those issued by WHO. Much of this noise, caused by, for example, bedrails being moved, overhead paging, trolleys, medical equipment, and staff shift changes, is unnecessarily loud.Health Care At A Healthcare Facility Essay The problem is exacerbated by the prevalence of hard, sound-refl ecting fl oors and ceilings that cause sounds to reverberate, linger, and propagate over large areas into patients’ rooms and staff areas. Noise is a much greater problem in multi-bed than in single-patient rooms, owing to the additional disruptions caused by roommates. Noise has been associated with sleep loss and fragmentation, high blood pressure and heart rates, worse rates of recovery from myocardial infarction, and decreased oxygen saturation in infants in neonatal intensive care. For staff , noise is a stressful latent environmental condition that increases fatigue and job strain, and in some clinical situations heightens risk of error. Health-care building projects should therefore accord high priority to creating much quieter environments. Research shows that a quiet hospital is created mainly through appropriate design of the physical environment, not by modifying staff behaviour or organisational culture. Proven eff ective design measures for reducing noise include provision of single-bed rooms, elimination or insulation of noise sources (for example, replacement of overhead paging with a noiseless system), and installation of high-performance sound-absorbing ceiling tiles that diminish noise propagation. Carpeting in hallways and waiting areas further lessens propagation. In terms of safety, research strongly supports the conclusion that design of the physical environment is important for reducing infections spread by airborne and contact transmission; infection rates are lower when patients are in single rather than multi-bed rooms and air quality is very good. Single rooms have advantages over multi-bed rooms in reducing airborne transmission through ventilation and the possibility of such air quality measures as fi ltration, air changes, creation of positive air pressure to protect an immunocompromised patient from airborne pathogens in adjacent spaces, or creation of negative room pressure to prevent a patient with an aerially spread infection from infecting others. Other evidence suggests that single rooms also help to decrease risk of infections spread by contact. Single rooms are easier than multi-bed rooms to clean thoroughly after a patient leaves, lessening the problem of contaminated environmental surfaces remaining as pathogen reservoirs that can spread infection through hand contact.Health Care At A Healthcare Facility Essay Single rooms also enable separation or isolation of patients on admission, so that those with unrecognised infections can be identifi ed and assignment to multi-bed rooms with uninfected patients avoided. A major source of contact transmission of infection is unwashed staff hands, and low hand-washing rates among staff are well documented. Evidence suggests that hand-cleaning compliance is worse when sinks and dispensers of alcohol hand gel are positioned several paces away from staff work or movement paths, or behind doors or in other locations outside the visual fi elds of busy nurses and physicians. There are encouraging indications that installation of wash basins and gel dispensers close to staff work paths in visually prominent locations near the point of care leads to sustained increases in hand washing. Floor layouts can be designed to reduce staff fatigue and increase time for care. Conventional fl oor layouts for patient-care units generally provide corridors organised around a central nursing station, where medications and charts are located, and a central location for supplies. Nurses therefore spend much of their time walking up and down halls engaged in wasteful activity, such as fetching supplies, thereby increasing fatigue and shrinking the time available for observing patients and delivering direct care. By contrast, fl oor layouts with decentralised nurse charting or observation stations and supplies dispersed to be close to patients’ rooms cut staff time spent walking and fetching and greatly increase time for observation and care of patients.
Trust. Health Care At A Healthcare Facility Essay