Developing Organizational Policies and Practices
Add a section to the paper you submitted in Module 1. The new section should address the following:
Identify and describe at least two competing needs impacting your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
Describe a relevant policy or practice in your organization that may influence your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
Critique the policy for ethical considerations, and explain the policy’s strengths and challenges in promoting ethics.
Recommend one or more policy or practice changes designed to balance the competing needs of resources, workers, and patients, while addressing any ethical shortcomings of the existing policies. Be specific and provide examples.
Cite evidence (articles within last 5 years) that informs the healthcare issue/stressor and/or the policies, and provide two scholarly resources (within last 5 years) in support of your policy or practice recommendations.
Policies and Practices
The provision of healthcare services is under pressure to ensure all the patients’ needs are met satisfactorily. Healthcare organizations, which are struggling with resources such as revenue or human power are disadvantaged to provide the best quality of care (Petrovski & Goldstein, 2016). The competing needs include the need for quality, safe and efficient patient versus the limited resources available to a hospital. It is thus essential for healthcare management to develop policies that will help balance the needs (Khoury, Iademarco & Riley, 2016). Statistics indicate that the number of people who are seeking medical care is rising. The number is higher since most of the baby boomers who are aging, most of them have chronic diseases whereas the emerging millennial are seeking medical care. The high demand for quality care comes at a time that healthcare organizations are struggling with resources. The resources are required to pay sufficient employees, invest in research, drugs, and security of data.
Healthcare Policy
One of the policies that may impact the current condition in the healthcare organization is the introduction of precision medicine. Precision medicine or simply personalized medicine is the prescription of drugs provided to patients based on their genetic composition (Khoury, Iademarco & Riley, 2016). The drugs are more effective and thus patients do not need to spend a lot of time in the hospital. Additionally, patients can be treated from a virtual location, which will save cost. The policy will require the hospital to invest in research to generate data on how precision medicine can be implemented. It will also benchmark in other hospitals to find out how they are implementing the treatment approach. The policy will solve the competing needs by providing quality care to the patients and enhancing treatment (Duffy, 2015). On the other hand, it will save cost on hospitals thus minimizing the usage of resources on treating recurrent conditions.
Introduction of precision medicine has ethical considerations such as spending massive resources in developing a treatment for one patient while leaving out the many to suffer. Precision medicine will focus on the genetic composition of individuals (Duffy, 2015). It will take time and research, which will mean the larger group will miss receiving the right treatment, which presents a weakness. Another ethical issue is that once the research is complete, the number of drugs to be manufactured can end up being a waste. The reason is that the condition may be unique, but the patient may eventually die. Therefore, there is no justification for the resources and time spent in generating precision drugs. Genetic research may lead to discrimination of patients whose genetic composition is deemed more prone to diseases (Duffy, 2015). The individuals will be required to pay higher premiums thus preventing them from acquiring quality healthcare. Therefore, the precision medicine policy has various weaknesses in promoting quality care. However, it has strengths since it will lead to the discovery of genetics compositions prone to certain diseases thus adopting preventing approaches.
Recommendations
Precision medicine is the future of healthcare, but the policy cannot solve the current problem of a high number of patients and the shortage of nurses or resources. The policy changes required include restricting precision medicine to emerging diseases such as cancer. The policy should indicate that precision medicine will be used in research for the treatment of rare types of cancer. The reason is that resources will be utilized effectively to help people with various types of cancer (Dzau & Ginsburg, 2016). It will eliminate the high cost of cancer that patients bear and still end up dying. The number of people who have cancer is few thus justifying how genetic knowledge can be used to treat and prevent the different forms of cancer. Patients are spending massive resources on treatment of cancer alone, which can be eliminated with the use of precision medicine.
One of the existing policies in healthcare is that treatment should be affordable with the introduction of government initiatives to subsidize the cost. The focus of the government in lowering the cost of healthcare is to take care of the high number of people who are sick. The existing policies restrict insurance firms from raising health premiums to avoid hiking the cost of healthcare (Dzau & Ginsburg, 2016). One of the ethical shortcomings of the policy is that it diminishes the quality of healthcare. The reason is that thousands of people will flock in a health facility every month in search of treatment. Due to the shortage of nurses, the sick people will not find quality treatment. It thus has ethical shortcomings since it does not deliver the intended outcome. The rising number of patients is choking the healthcare facilities due to the lack of sufficient personnel and resources (Dzau & Ginsburg, 2016). For example, healthcare facilities will incur high costs to treat the millions of baby boomers who are now aging most of them have at least one chronic disease. The affordable care policy has increased the number of people seeking medical treatment, yet it does not provide a way of raising the extra funds needed for the provision of treatment.
References
Duffy, D. J. (2015). Problems, challenges, and promises: perspectives on precision medicine. Briefings in bioinformatics, 17(3), 494-504.
Dzau, V. J., & Ginsburg, G. S. (2016). Realizing the full potential of precision medicine in health and health care. Jama, 316(16), 1659-1660.
Khoury, M. J., Iademarco, M. F., & Riley, W. T. (2016). Precision public health for the era of precision medicine. American journal of preventive medicine, 50(3), 398.
Petrovski, S., & Goldstein, D. B. (2016). Unequal representation of genetic variation across ancestry groups creates healthcare inequality in the application of precision medicine. Genome biology, 17(1), 157.
