In my opinion two drivers such as quality and cost are the most importance in high performance healthcare systems. However, it is hard for the two drivers to go hand in hand. One would think that in order to get high quality healthcare, it would cost more. In my current work situation there is always a staffing shortage in the ICU, probably because other departments RN cannot float to ICU since it is a specialty unit. It costs hospital to staff RNs in order to provide quality care and maintain the patients to nurse ratios. Not having adequate staff due to cost containment can jeopardize efficient quality healthcare. “Nurse staffing has a significant impact on both quality of care and cost due to nurses’ vital role as front‐line care providers, and insufficient staffing and unreasonable home healthcare costs can thus reduce health benefits through missed opportunities to improve patients’ health status” (Park, 2017).
People tend to associate things that are not costly with poor quality. Which comes to mind, the objective of the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA)” was to attain virtually worldwide health insurance coverage in the United States. ACA helped a lot of people get insurance for an affordable price. “On the supply side, concerns have been raised about whether there are sufficient numbers of primary care physicians to treat all of these newly insured patients” (Courtemanche et al., 2018). Now that everyone could be insured, the question is how will the quality of care be affected? What types of physicians will care for these patients. Time with patients will be compromised due to lack of time to see patients. I believe there must be a medium for quality of healthcare and cost.
Courtemanche C., Marton J., Ukert B., Yelowitz A., & Zapata D. (2018). Early Effects of the Affordable Care Act on Health Care Access, Risky Health Behaviors, and Self-Assessed Health. Southern Economic Journal. 84(3), p660-691. 32p. DOI: 10.1002/soej.12245.
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