Accountability entails measures and procedures that are taken to ensure justification and assumption of responsibilities for various actions in an organization. In other words, it means that an individual is ready to assume responsibility as a result of any negative impacts or due to errors of commission or omissions with regard the activities and task that one has been assigned to. The various professional bodies now require individuals to be accountable to their actions in the various disciplines. At the same time, various institutions have also implemented policies that allows for the assessment of accountability.
Accountability in health care
In a health care system, Accountability involves three key elements which are; Loci of accountability which involves the 11 parties that can hold others or be held accountable (Medical News Today, 2010). These parties include patients, physicians, hospitals, non-physicians like nurses, employers, government, lenders or investors of capital, payers, courts, professional associations, private payers, and managed care plans. It has been noted that this list can be bigger than outlined, but often some listed parties pay little roles, while others play more than one role.
The second aspect is domain of accountability. This involves the issues that a party can be held responsible and sometime be summoned to go and change its action or justify (Medical News Today, 2010). The domain involves at least six areas that include financial, promotion of public health, ethical conduct, community benefit, professional competence and legally. Some of them like ethical conduct are generally accepted, while others such as financial are considered controversial. The third aspect is procedure of accountability. This entails verifying that a specified set of actions was followed for a certain area. This can either be one formally or informally.
Accountability in health care is important because if it is well managed it can greatly reduce the number of deaths that sometimes results due to poor attention given to patients by physicians a majority of health cares do not have in place well structures that have achievable and measurable routines which they can employ to avoid death of patients (Sharpe, 2004). It has been noted that various health cares oppose their establishments greatly. This can be viewed as a move for physicians to avoid accountability for their own mistakes.
One paramount issue advocated by Sharpe is that physicians should do away with their ignorance that all will go well when attending to patients and their lack of preparedness for emergencies. This is because these assumptions have resulted to lose of many lives that could have been saved if the physicians had ensured that all the required procedures were followed. For example, in the United States, it is estimated that about 200,000 patients die annually as a result of diagnostic errors, health care associated infections and other avoidable mistakes. (Sharpe, 2004).Therefore, if the government ensures that the health care industries is well equipped with functional model for accountability, such high loses in lives can be prevented since the physicians will be more attentive when attending their patients by avoiding any assumptions that can translate to any loss of life.
An employee accountability measure in a health care can be determined by patients’ satisfactions. This is considered as the best approach to judge the quality of service rendered to patients. A satisfied patient brings the notion that he/she is happy with services received. This will be reflected by an increase in the number of patients visiting the health care provider. This is because satisfied patients are likely to come back in future or refer their friends or family members. When patients are not satisfied with services they receive, there is a high probability that they will not revisit that health care provider in future or refer anybody there. As a result the number of patients that visit such institution will decrease. In such case, the hospital will develop a culture of receiving any new patients every time who do not come back in future as they are not happy with the services they received. Therefore, from the use of patients’ satisfaction of aspect, employees’ accountability in a health care can be realized.
Accountability in health care will ensure that health care personnel such as the physicians are attentive when rendering their services to patients (Knowledge@Wharton, 2007). This will ensure that they do not take anything for granted to avoid the consequences of their mistakes. This will translate to a culture of high competence when every employee is very committed to the organization goal of saving lives. By ensuring that all the health care agencies have established a quality management system is the sure way to ensure there is accountability in health care. To ensure that good checks and balances, and avoid the culture of blame, the management should make sure that the system adapted is a participative model where every employee is ready to take responsibility for enhancing quality within the health care (Sibbald et al, 2009).
In summary, health care agencies are now very committed to enhance their service by adapting quality improvement systems and performance management models. Though, all these are important elements in efficiency health care delivery, it is only by ensuring that they employ participative quality management system that accountability in health care they will be realized.
Reference List
Knowledge@Wharton. (2007). Managing Emotions in the Workplace: Do Positive and Negative Attitudes Drive Performance? Web.
Medical News Today. (2010). Bringing true accountability to health care, lessons from efforts to reduce hospital-acquired infections. Web.
Sharpe, V. A. (2004). Accountability: patient safety and policy reform. Washington, D. C.: Georgetown University Press Sibbald, S. L., Singer, P. A., Upshur, R., & Martin, D. K. (2009). Priority setting: what constitutes success? A conceptual framework for successful priority setting. BMC Health Serv Res, 9: 43.