MEDICAL CARE QUALITY

Measuring Quality of Care in the Medical Health Care System

Measuring Quality of Care in the Medical Health Care System

Introduction

Emphasis has been placed on paying attention to the issue of patient satisfaction. At different points in time, the emphasis on this issue has varied from one health care system to another. The views of patients' started gaining attention with the advent of consumerism in the United States in the early 1960s. Several cultural critiques raised questions on expertise of the medical profession. The professional values of the profession, in addition to the forms of, care was challenged by feminism. Though analysts in that era believed that layman views had been co-opted by more dominant organizational and professional interests (Alford 1975), however, consumerism also triggered the range of challenges to the dominant medical model.

The medical model has various perspectives including a physician or health-care provider's perspective and a patient's perspective. The discussion and analysis section will study diverse perspectives to the medical profession in depth.

Discussion & Analysis

Patient's perspective to healthcare

Though the involvement of patients in the healthcare system can still be termed as limited, however, the patient satisfaction research has managed to highlight the importance of taking the patient's viewpoint. The incapacity to give due consideration to the patients' viewpoints regarding their health care content is the most significant evidence of this conservatism. It is very unlikely for patients to be asked about any aspect of their experience of health care including the value of the treatment they received. The meta-analysis of published researches on patient satisfaction, by Hall and Dornan (1988) indicated, that 65% of all studies were conducted on interpersonal relations and humaneness. Only 6% elicited patients' views about the results of their health care. A similar conclusion regarding the meta-analysis of studies of patients' views concerning primary care was deduced by Wensing et al. (1994). His analysis indicated that 65% of all studies were focused humaneness whereas 48% emphasized on in formativeness, and only 8% took into account the patients' views concerning outcomes or effectiveness of care. The neglect of patients' opinions regarding the consequences of care on outcomes has also been noted by Cleary and McNeil (1988). The impression from researches and literature on patient satisfaction is such that need to be treated by courtesy and humanity is more important than health outcomes, and patients' views on health-care received. A broader perception of uncritical and passive agreement of patients to the judgments of various other influential bodies within the health care system is portrayed by the inadequate attention, and emphasis on the patients' opinion about the outcomes of the healthcare provided to them.

Pollitt (1987) is of the opinion that political and organizational thrust in the context of patients' involvement in the satisfaction research comes from health service management. This is one of the various reasons behind overlooking the patients' views regarding healthcare.

Evident limits to the domains of health care into which management has felt entitled to enquire have been observed despite the widely accepted notion that ...