To provide proper medical and nursing care, it is of great importance to developing a good resource management strategy. For instance, any assets available to care providers should be used in a way that maximizes their effectiveness and prevents extra expenses. Nowadays, waste resources in modern healthcare systems include money and healthcare professionals’ time spent on excessive diagnostic interventions, unnecessary treatment, and ineffective patient education.
The examples of resource waste include overdiagnosis and overtreatment related to professionals’ willingness to err on the side of caution. Overdiagnosis involves spending money on medical tests that are not necessary and often results in the treatment of conditions that do not contribute to patients’ primary medical problems (McCaffery et al., 2016). Apart from the misuse of financial resources and personnel’s time, the tendency is associated with detrimental health outcomes for patients. In some instances, extra interventions may reduce the effectiveness of indispensable treatment, thus affecting patients’ recovery (McCaffery et al., 2016). Overtreatment and overdiagnosis present the misapplication of funds and time, and preventing them is critical to the quality of care.
The problem of healthcare waste also exists when it comes to client education and patients’ adherence to recommendations. For instance, despite constant patient education efforts initiated by endocrinologists and diabetes consultants, diabetes patients’ adherence to treatment and self-management recommendations is far from perfect (Yu, Varughese, Li, & Kushner, 2018). This tendency is partially responsible for increases in avoidable treatment costs and medical complications when it comes to diabetes management (Yu et al., 2018). Therefore, the effectiveness of patient counseling is a significant source of waste in healthcare systems.
To sum it up, the issue of wasted resources may influence the work of almost any healthcare institution and patient outcomes. The misuse of funds and healthcare professionals’ time leads to overtreatment and overdiagnosis, thus increasing spending and risks for patients. At the same time, failure to adequately use these resources also leads to the implementation of patient education strategies that do not work properly.
References
McCaffery, K. J., Jansen, J., Scherer, L. D., Thornton, H., Hersch, J., Carter, S. M.,… Brodersen, J. (2016). Walking the tightrope: Communicating overdiagnosis in modern healthcare. British Medical Journal, 352, i348. Web.
Yu, S., Varughese, B., Li, Z., & Kushner, P. R. (2018). Healthcare resource waste associated with patient nonadherence and early discontinuation of traditional continuous glucose monitoring in real-world settings: A multicountry analysis. Diabetes Technology & Therapeutics, 20(6), 420-427. Web.