Essay Sample on Accountability in Health Care: Taking Action and Overcoming Challenges

Introduction

Today we look at how health care professionals or staff can be accountable in their day to day activities and how they can overcome challenges relating to their specific fields of expertise. For our paper will have various discussion points but for now, let's start with defining some of the terms that can be a little difficult to explain. The word 'accountability' is commonly referred to as, taking responsibility for one's actions, always putting your patients' interests before your own or ensure to be competent always to perform the activity you've been asked to do. Now in the medical practice arena, it simply means, whatsoever works you do as a health care assistant, as a course of action one should be able to sensibly justify it. This inertly means as a medical professional, one must identify why one is doing it (the health care profession), one ought to be competent and have been properly trained to do it and you should have an agreed plan as part of the care for the patient.

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To comprehend what it means to be accountable in the health care field one must always consent to work with a team. Although even if one will always work under a registered member of staff's supervision and therefore they are the team's generally accountable for caregiving, one as part of the team is still accountable at what they do. There is the autonomy to practice where it can be achieved but only through accountability (Denis 2014). Autonomy states to a medical professional and a nurses' capability to' choices made contained by one owns profession and to act accordingly within their rights and responsibilities by the shared standards of that profession' (Varjus et al. 2010). Professional sovereignty shoots from various kinds of knowledge practice by the ability in a grave manner, to which patients are offered value and safe health care.

Roles in Accountability

With the ever-changing health care industry, we have witnessed a lot of change in this particular field, one which is perfectly clear and touches on our topic today is the emergence of health care support staff, registered nurses' roles and boundaries have been dynamically blurred. Some responsibilities of qualified nurses have been delegated to be done by these health care workers. Even with delegation tasks, nurses need some assurance that this unregistered workforce is adequately trained, responsible and competent (Irvine, 1998). When these responsibilities are not understood or recognized by health care workers, there can be a compromise on the quality and safety of care and good governance becomes a burden.

On the government's side, not left behind also must ensure that not only midwives, doctors or even nurses get ample training and education for competency in their different fields but also the unqualified medical support staff get their share of sufficient skills to support medical personnel. We can see the government has been somewhat active by standardizing their education somehow, even though it slightly meets the mandatory requirement and remains basic. For the advancement of this profession, safety and reliability must be delivered to nursing care to ensure more attention given to the training and development of the support staff.

Accountability Care Organization

We move on to Accountable Care Organization (ACOs), and how well can we define this term, and the simplest explanation is that these ACOs are sets of clinics, consultants or other fitness care staffs, that willingly come composed to give high value coordinated maintenance to the 'Medicare' patients. The main objective for this effort of the coordinated care is to ensure the right care is given to the patients and at the right time by preventing medical errors and duplication of unnecessary services is avoided. An important point to note down is, a minimum of 5000 Medicare beneficiaries will manage all health care needs performed confidently by the ACOs for at least three years since the law passed on January 2012 (McWilliams 2016). The patients' health will be made accountable jointly to the providers under ACOs, saving money by cooperating will hand them strong incentives by avoiding unnecessary measures and experiments. The ACOs that encounter the worth marks while saving cash will save a share of the cash.

The 'Department of Health and Human Services' in the United States had estimated (back in 2011) Medicare could save up to 960 million dollars because of the ACOs in the first three years. When patients were given more tests and more procedures they had to pay more to hospitals and doctors due to the traditional payment system of fee for service in Medicare. In this other case, the ACOs were to come to create saving incentives without necessarily doing away with fee for service by meeting quality specific benchmarks and when other providers keep costs down they may offer bonuses. The principal focus of this ACOs will be health promotion and disease prevention and keeping the patients healthy and out of the hospital with largely benefit the providers. ACOs have a successful implementation for nurses, as many experts point out, as these nurses' roles in the health care field have increased exponentially as they will take on more responsibilities and roles.

Challenges Faced by Accountability

For the health care workers and especially the nurses, who must be truly accountable they need to examine what it truly means, and this is based on the professional growth and development on sound theoretical foundations. Accountability is an issue which is so much complex as stated by experts on the medical arena, this practice examined by nurses require needs to be relative to healthcare consumers and this, in fact, examines other healthcare professionals and their relationships by nursing critical role increasingly in the system of health care (Martin 2011). The paper has looked at accountability care organizations, roles in the accountability and now we will look at the challenges facing the same, accountability.

There is a clear lack of consensus regarding the accountability components in health care, complexities are representative in part of such a field, clear responsibility in identifying difficulty in the related Medicare system. In accountability, it is usually attached to economic connotation. The threat of focusing on economic concerns lies disproportionately in less quantifiable neglecting aspects of health care, for which decision makers just as important should be accountable precisely on patient satisfaction. Accountability may also be challenged by regular standards of care and amenities not appreciated, ignorance from consent to care rules, access to care rules overruled due to exclusions or physicians' resistance and policies by government agencies which are impossible to oppose.

Changing the Role of a Healthcare Worker

Due to the change of the role of the health care worker according to the challenges posed in the study, is an ever-changing trend that looks at how changing the challenges into factors may ineffectively alter the role of a nurse or doctor in the health care profession. Health care workers and nurses are responsible to their patients to whom they owe something by the name of 'duty of care'. In the case of careless health care workers, some staff who go as far as to harm patients or clients or in other instances failure to normally do something expected for a health care assistant is normally called 'omission'. Legally accountable health care assistance if they make any errors to patients or harm caused by any harm they fail to act upon, and the case can be dragged in court by the patient affected by civil law. There are other extreme cases where a patient suffered serious bodily harm or had died due to an omission or an error, the criminal courts might be approached on the case.

Conclusion

In summary, we also find out that we can refer to accountability to similarly mean a code of conduct compliance by health care staff that only applies to one's organizations' code of conduct that they have in place and ones' member country. As a matter of fact, delegation can also be seen as a part of accountability, if one let's say unqualified health worker is given or delegated a task by a member of the staff. He or she must be given a chance to accept the duty because if delegated an unappropriated task and this, in turn, causes harm to a patient you will be both accountable for the harm done to the named patient.

Referencess

Denis, J. L. (2014). Accountability in healthcare organizations and systems. Healthcare Policy, 10(SP), 8.

Irvine, D., Sidani, S., & Hall, L. M. (1998). Linking outcomes to nurses' roles in health care. Nursing Economics, 16(2), 58.

McWilliams, J. M., Hatfield, L. A., Chernew, M. E., Landon, B. E., & Schwartz, A. L. (2016). Early performance of accountable care organizations in Medicare. New England Journal of Medicine, 374(24), 2357-2366.

Martin, G. P., & Finn, R. (2011). Patients as team members: opportunities, challenges, and paradoxes of including patients in multiprofessional healthcare teams. Sociology of Health & Illness, 33(7), 1050-1065.