Wasted resources in health care
I have encountered several cases where resources were wasted due to either overuse or underuse of certain resources such as hospital beds and certain drugs. The issues were caused not only by the need to provide quality care to patients but also due to the inappropriate allocation of resources by the management. The plan for resource acquisition at the start of the year was overly reliant on the statistics of the previous year without much room for flexibility in case an unexpected issue occurs. There was a noticeable change in the occurrences of conditions this year. Some of the most prominent issues of the last year, such as pressure ulcers, became less frequent due to our interventions, but several new issues appeared.
Currently, the hospital experiences an overabundance of underused resources needed for pressure ulcer prevention but has a serious lack of resources needed for the new issues. I believe that this issue could have been avoided if the management used more accurate analysis tools designed specifically for hospital use. This would have prevented some negative outcomes that occurred at the hospital while still maintaining the success we encountered with the pressure ulcer intervention. The issue gradually grew with each year of my nursing practice, and I am worried that it could become much larger in the future. Currently, the efforts of our medical staff are sufficient to prevent the majority of problems for our patients. However, if this issue is not addressed with the next resource management plan, I am not sure that we would be able to deal with the lack of needed resources (Elshaug et al., 2017).
Wasted efforts in health
One serious example of wasted efforts that I am aware of happened in a nearby clinic about 10 years ago during their implementation of electronic hospital records. I am acquainted with one of the nurses that were responsible for the transition of their archive of physical patient records into the new system which is why I know about this incident. The process of implementation was relatively straightforward because the system the management staff acquired was relatively easy to use and had no obvious issues. However, the transition of the archive of older records was proving to be a problem due to the massive amount of work and lack of staff that could be directly dedicated to it. She described that despite the ease of use the electronic system was not created to deal well with the format of the very old documents.
The process was going much slower than it was scheduled and after three months of work, the management of the clinic chose to contact the development team of the system to ask for assistance with this issue. It was resolved in less than a week, and the transition process sped up dramatically. This solution could have been implemented in the first instance when the problem occurred, but the management chose to wait before involving outside help in fear of additional payments. As a result, the clinic had a reduced staff for the hours of work that were spent working with the faulty system. Since then, such issues have received much more attention and with the implementation of new planning techniques, a major waste of effort is avoided. I have not personally experienced such a situation, but I am prepared to inform my management of this case if it is needed (Longenecker & Longenecker, 2014).
References
Elshaug, A. G., Rosenthal, M. B., Lavis, J. N., Brownlee, S., Schmidt, H., Nagpal, S., … Saini, V. (2017). Levers for addressing medical underuse and overuse: Achieving high-value health care. The Lancet, 390(10090), 191–202.
Longenecker, C. O., & Longenecker, P. D. (2014). Why hospital improvement efforts fail: A view from the front line. Journal of Healthcare Management, 59(2), 147.