HEALTHCARE ISSUES

Healthcare Issues

Abstract

This paper focuses on the quality of waste management practices at Children Mercy Hospital. Quality management in health services delivery has two components: quality assurance and quality improvement. Quality assurance is an approach to quality management typically composed of a formal retrospective process of identifying medical delivery problems, finding means for overcoming them, and taking corrective actions to address them. Quality improvement is a management philosophy to improve health system performance by identifying medical care process failures through ongoing monitoring, empowering workers to make changes, and using the scientific method to continuously reduce process variation by removing wasted action and rework in process activities. Both types of quality management measure quality with regard to the structure, process, and outcomes of medical care delivery. These measurements may occur with regard to specific clinical situations or a population of individuals in a community, state, or the nation.

Healthcare Issues

Introduction

Organizational Overview

The Children's Mercy Hospital has been providing exclusive medical service to children from birth to 18 years of age for more than 100 years. Children's Mercy Hospital today provides the highest level of medical care, technology, services, equipment and facilities all tailored to meet the intricate needs of its pediatric patients (www.med.umkc.edu). Child magazine ranked Children's Mercy as one of the ten best children's hospitals in America in 2003, and the American Nurses Credentialing Center has awarded Children's Mercy its rare Magnet designation for the high quality of patient care.

The hospital provides treatments, tests and surgeries rarely found outside large university medical centers (www.med.umkc.edu). The Children's Mercy system includes the main hospital and outpatient center on Hospital Hill; Children's Mercy South (short-stay inpatient unit, same-day surgery, urgent care center and specialty clinics) in Overland Park, KS; five primary care clinics in inner city locations; 20 outreach specialty clinics throughout the region; and a home health program. The Children's Mercy research program is nationally recognized, particularly in the fields of clinical pharmacology, genetics, and neonatology (www.med.umkc.edu).

Children's Mercy has programs in quality waste management, child advocacy, community violence prevention, managed care, inpatient hospitalists, behavioral and developmental pediatrics, clinical pharmacology (with its own clinical research unit), molecular genetics, alternative medicine, international pediatrics and other non-traditional programs that are emerging in importance (www.med.umkc.edu).

Waste Management Issue at Children's Mercy Hospital

One of the primary issues facing Children's Mercy Hospital is that of quality waste management. The administration of the hospital has identified quality management with regards to waste disposal as having three primary aspects: (a) knowing what works, (b) using what works, and (c) doing well what works. To this list, a fourth element should be added: knowing the resources needed for what works. Quality assurance and quality improvement emphasize the second and third aspects of quality management (Weingarten, 2002).

The quantity of waste generated depends on the socioeconomic conditions, cultural habits of the people, urban structure, density of population, extent of commercial activity, and degree of salvaging at source. Some of the factors that contribute to an increase in solid waste generation are growth in Gross Domestic ...