Memorial Hospital
Read the “Memorial Hospital” case study in Chapter 4 of your text. In a three- to four-page paper, respond to the guided response below.
- Discuss ways that a hospital might measure quality. Be sure to explain your reasoning.
- Explain the potential costs and failures of quality for Memorial Hospital and discuss how each can be measured.
- Discuss ideas or techniques from TQM that Janice could use to help Memorial focus on providing quality health care.
- Analyze the methods Memorial could use to assess the quality of health care it is providing.
Your paper should be in paragraph form (avoid the use of bullet points) and supported with the concepts outlined in your text and additional scholarly sources.
Submit your three- to four-page paper (not including the title and reference pages). Your paper must be formatted according to APA style
Memorial Hospital
Memorial Hospital is a privately owned 600-bed facility. The hospital provides a broad range ofhealth care services, including complete laboratory and X-ray facilities, an emergency room, anintensive care unit, a cardiac care unit, and a psychiatric ward. Most of these services areprovided by several other hospitals in the metropolitan area. Memorial has purposely avoidedgetting involved in any specialized fields of medicine or obtaining very specialized diagnosticequipment because it was felt that such services would not be cost-effective.The GeneralHospital, located only a few miles from Memorial, is affiliated with the local School of Medicineand offers up-to-date services in those specialized areas. Instead of trying to compete withGeneral Hospital to provide special services, Memorial Hospital has concentrated on offeringhigh-quality general health care at an affordable price. Compared with the much largerGeneral Hospital, Memorial stresses close personal attention to each patient from a nursingstaff that cares about its work. In fact, the hospital has begun to place ads in newspapers andon television, stressing its patient-oriented care.
However, the hospital’s administrator, Janice Fry, is concerned about whether the hospital canreally deliver on its promises, and worries that failure to provide the level of health carepatients expect could drive patients away.Janice met recently with the hospital’s managerialpersonnel to discuss her concerns. The meeting raised some questions about how thehospital’s quality of health care could be assured. Jessica Tu, director of nursing, raised thequestion, “How do we measure the quality of health care? Do we give patients a questionnairewhen they leave, asking if they were happy here? That does not seem to answer the questionbecause we could make a patient happy, but give them lousy health care.” Several otherquestions were asked concerning the hospital’s efforts to keep costs down. Some people wereconcerned that an emphasis on costs would be detrimental to quality. They argued that whena person’s life is at stake, costs should not be of concern.
After the meeting, Janice began thinking about these questions. She remembered readingrecently that some companies were using total quality management (TQM) to improve theirquality. She liked the idea—if it could be used in a hospital.
- Discuss some ways that a hospital might measure quality.
- What are the potential costs of quality for Memorial Hospital? How could the value of ahuman life be included?
- Are there any ideas or techniques from TQM that Janice could use to help Memorialfocus on providing quality health care?
- What measures could Memorial use to assess the quality of health care it is providing?
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