LEVEL OF GOVERNMENT INVOLVED IN HEALTHCARE

Posted by Winnie Melda on October 3rd, 2018

LEVEL OF GOVERNMENT INVOLVED IN HEALTHCARE

Patients, members of the general public and families do rarely know the roles of nurses and most specifically their financial contributions for the nurse’s responsibilities. I have only encountered a few who know our roles as nurses and recognize our efforts. These are mainly those who have witnessed nurses undertaking the laborious task of assisting the sick especially those in the Intensive Care Unit or those who have stayed in the hospital for long durations of time.

The main reward I get fulfilled within my nursing career is that family and friends of patients, and patients whom I have taken care will thank me for my work but what they hardly know are that nurses do not make enough money that equates to the kind of services we offer. The article by Buerhaus (2010) shows that the actual cost of care for nursing is invisible within the present payment system. Disentangling the cost of nursing from the room charges of patients will be a major challenge, but the anticipated advantages may be worth the effort.

     Disentangling nursing costs have the advantage of enhancing accountability of nurses. As the way things are present, nurses are not accountable to the overall outcome of their actions or the care that each patient receives (Buerhaus, 2010). It is common to find nurses whom we can entrust every member of our family, but some cannot be trusted. Thus, it is most likely that nurses providing the best possible nursing care to patients will contribute to the best outcomes of their patients. Thus, these are the nurses who deserve the best and most appropriate salaries and fiscal compensation. With such a move it contributes to other advantages such as nurses will be motivated to work above and beyond their expectations of proving high-quality patient care.

 Another advantage of untangling unstrings cost is that it becomes possible to measure the economic and contribution of nurses as well as set a price for the nursing care just like the physician care. When such a system will contribute to the designing of a rational payment system that reflects on the contributions of nurses in providing care. The esteem will ensure that there is the allocation of nursing resources according to their costs and time were given to each patient. Payments made as per the optimum nursing care mainly the care that provides the best outcomes possible with the least costs decreases the incentives that contribute to heavy workloads of nursing and poor quality outcomes.

The policy priority of my choice is one that looks into mandatory overtime. The issue of overtimes is among the top issues that nurses face and makes them leave the workforce. Some issues of mandatory overtime contribute to lowering productivity, high turnover rates among nurses, longer stays in hospitals among patients and high rates of errors (Ols & Clarke 2010). Thus, the disentangling of nursing costs from the hospital charges would not change these issues but will reinforce the usage of mandatory overtime.

References

Buerhaus, P. I. (2010). Health care payment reform: Implications for nurses. Nursing Economic$, 28(1), 49-54.

Ols, D. M. & Clarke, S. P. (2010).The work hours effects on adverse events and health care errors. Journal of Safety Research. 41(2), 153-162. Doi: 10.1016/j.jsr.2010.02.002

Sherry Roberts is the author of this paper. A senior editor at Melda Research in <a href="https://www.meldaresearch.com">research paper services</a> if you need a similar paper you can place your order for <a href="https://researchpapers247.com">cheap research paper services</a>