Policy Change at Daisy Hill Hospital

POLICY CHANGE AT DAISY HILL HOSPITAL
Student’s Name
Course
Professor’s Name
University
Date
Policy Change at Daisy Hill Hospital
Policies help to shape organizational goals and guide the achievement of the objectives. They assist in identifying the key issues that affect a firm and how to manage those issues to achieve the set goals. They help organizations improve their consistency, accountability, efficiency, and clarity in performing their duties. In terms of consistency, policies ensure that the organization's processes do not deviate from the initial plan even when key members leave. In terms of accountability, they help ensure that the procedures are well followed to avoid unfairness or legal violations that some members may suffer from. For efficiency purposes, the policies improve the overall organizational performance by ensuring that everyone is on the same page in terms of expectations and issues. Policy changes are proposed whenever the current policies fail to meet any of these elements.
The Daisy Hill Hospital is an acute teaching hospital based in Newry in the United Kingdom. Like many other hospitals worldwide, the institution is under the pressure of handling the COVID-19 pandemic more effectively and efficiently. The pandemic has exposed the loopholes in many hospitals that need to be fixed, mainly meant to curb the susceptibility of the patients to die. The pandemic has revealed the need to develop a policy that focuses on primary care. The initial recommendation by the World Health Organization was based on system adaptations for the affected countries. Which mainly focused on secondary care and public health (Dickens et al., 2020). Primary care has received little policy attention in Daisy Hill and many other hospitals around the country. The hospital remains a high-risk area, with mortality rates at 40% among the patients receiving critical care (ICNARC, 2020). As the cases continue to increase, there is an urgent need for policy change measures to improve home-based care management and reduce unnecessary admissions that increase the limited hospital resources.
Current State of Primary Care
The drastic changes in the healthcare sector in response to the COVID-19 pandemic had an immense impact on delivering primary care in the country. There was a substantial increase in the use of telephones, emails, and other forms of remote communication between patients and caregivers. The new development freed the caregivers, allowing them to take care of only selected patients who needed urgent personal care, such as requiring physical examination. COVID-19 suspects were redirected to NHS 111 call centers for testing purposes. However, NHS 111 shifted the burden of testing and managing the condition and undermined general practice's potential to give continual and comprehensive care. The call center staff lacked total access to patient records and had limited information concerning the coexistence conditions of the patients and their home situations. Many patients lacked the opportunity to receive long-term care, which resulted in fatalities.
General practitioners have been responsible for the care of several patients under home-based care. However, the shift to remote working has resulted in inconsistent support for care homes because of the insufficient personal protective equipment and the increase in demand for personalized care at the hospital. Patients with severe symptoms have continued to be admitted to hospitals. However, the number of deaths has continued to increase both from COVID-19 and other associated diseases. Up to 30% of these deaths have occurred outside hospitals. For example, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS, 2020), the number of deaths in homecare settings surpassed the five-year average as of July 2020. These findings affirm the need for policy change focusing on primary care.
Focus Areas
The above analysis presents an unassailable case for change. If the hospital does not change the way it provides its health and social care, the situation will only worsen as the demand continues to increase. The pandemic has given the hospital a picture of what the future holds. If no action is taken, the current code of conduct does not guarantee effectiveness in handling future challenges. The hospital needs to change its approach to the delivery of care. The transformation process will require significant cultural and operational changes in the hospital and the entire health care system and the way the public access these systems. The funding mechanisms will require to be realigned to ensure that they meet the need to incorporate care at the provider level. There will be a need for better frontline improvements and innovations at the provider level to facilitate the achievement of the triple aim, which entails improving the individual's experience of care, the health of populations, and reducing the per capital cost of care for the people.
This proposed policy change is not focused on eliminating inpatient service delivery. Instead, it focuses on changing the way healthcare service providers offer their services. It is designed to help fulfill the triple aims because home-based care delivery can lead to the best patient experiences because they are treated within the confines of their homes, other members of the family learn more about healthcare, which means that the population will have better health, and the fact that the caregiver visits the home to deliver the services means that there are no transport costs on the side of the patient. Besides, since the patient receives the service while at home, there are no hospital fees, making the cost manageable.
Policy Directives
The first policy directive is to equip the service providers with appropriate knowledge to handle health challenges, deliver healthcare services, and educate the public about home-based care delivery. These providers must be incorporated in the strategy formulation to prepare the staff for unprecedented outbreaks such as the coronavirus. All these developments cannot happen with a poor communication mechanism. Therefore, communication between the primary caregivers, the public health practitioners, and secondary care providers is essential. The hospital should focus on forming clinical commissioning groups and primary care networks that will ensure that patients receive the services they deserve without delay.
The policy should also focus on investing, empowering, and building capacity in the networks of the current health and social care providers. Empowering people and forming social networks will enable the facility to monitor the progress of its patients and take appropriate measures to safeguard their health. This initiative is feasible because the country already has several building blocks to ensure the development of Accountable Care Systems. Many of the elements of an integrated system are already in place, which means that the hospital will only need to improve on them to achieve their full potential. These Integrated Care Partnerships have to be equipped with devolved autonomy and incentives the funding mechanisms to help boost delivery of the services. An excellent example of this development is in the hospital’s renal unit, which was established in June 1998 (South Health and Social Care Trust, 2021). The initiative has had a significant contribution to the delivery of renal services across North Ireland. It has evolved significantly and formed partnerships with key figures to advance its services beyond the hospital walls. Therefore, the new policy should advocate for better support and the development of social partnerships.
The policy change should also focus on improving the relationship between health and social care services by advocating for more and more studies. Social factors, including education, income, nutrition, and suitable housing, are critical determinants of mortality rates. According to Walsh et al. (2020), there has been an increasing mortality rate among the socioeconomically deprived individuals in the UK population. Fenton et al. (2019) note that the inequalities have significantly contributed to the increase in the mortality rates since 2012. The purpose of the primary care policy change will be to reduce these social inequalities by ensuring that people of all social classes have equal access to healthcare. It will ensure that individuals released from the hospital proceed to total recovery before ending the communication. Home-based caretakers who are well equipped with the appropriate education, coupled with proper follow-up, will reduce the mortality rates that result from poor care that such people often receive.
The policy will be designed to prioritize care for individuals with chronic conditions. It will advocate for the formation of targeted programs that will connect patients suffering from various chronic conditions to social support schemes that will allow health workers to visit them and advise them on appropriate measures to improve their health. This program should collaborate with the Transforming Your Care reform program, which strives to transform the delivery and management of health and social care in the country. This program focuses on improving the healthcare of the aging population, especially those living with chronic conditions, and reducing the stress on the constrained resources (NIAO, 2017). The new policy should focus on advancing these ideals and ensuring that patients suffering from many other chronic illnesses access such services irrespective of age.
Another ...