The way forward to better healthcare

I was talking to a colleague from university, who is now part of a management committee of a certain hospital. We conversed about a lot of things.

When he raised concerns about the quality of our healthcare system, I couldn’t help but be hysteric about it. Not because I can understand the vicious cycle that we are in but because I didn’t know where to start from with regards to it.

He continued saying, a hospital thrives of the quality of healthcare it provides, and if without that, we may not be able to sustain it forward for a very long time.

Mind you this is the same management committee that heads hospital’s decisions and due to a budget, it chooses a minimum number of healthcare professionals to work with.

With the demand of patients, we do not expect the health professionals to have quality time with each patient thus producing poor therapeutic outcomes.

It is not that the health professionals are incompetent, but it is because he/she wants to practise his/her best but what limits them is time and large number of patients.

This decline in quality healthcare then corresponds to less patients preferring the hospital and thus less capital in return, which cannot invest in better health professionals. In conclusion, trapped in the vicious cycle.

Even if they do have the capital, with the increasing demand of health professionals, higher number of graduates and our not so adjusted education system, the quality of these professionals get affected.

This leads to poor dependence on our graduates and hiring of low-level technicians and assistants to carry out a professional responsibility, which in turn leads to a poor quality of healthcare service. This cycle that we are in has already affected many [healthcare professionals] and continues to do so.

We have physicians, pharmacists and nurses who are not willing to work with each other for the betterment of the patient.

Medicine is such a huge field that requires years of knowledge and practise and even then, they may have just specialised in a single area. Yet a recent graduate will not consult other colleagues, medical books and journals. Why?

Is it because the patient will “talk” about him/her not knowing to others? Well, I cannot completely have an answer to that; maybe it’s just the attitude of young professionals. Some of these “concerns” have a cultural notion to it, we live in a society where a physician or any healthcare professional “needs to know everything!”

Try and ask an accountant if they know the latest accounting standards, and they will surprise you with the answers.

They shall clearly tell you these are regular updates and sometimes we don’t even use them, and yet in a such a diverse field of medicine, “they” expect that you must know everything about medicine. All these are interconnected to one another, and without a change of perception first, we shall not move further.

You could change this attitude and work with a small group of multi health diverse individuals in the hospital who can really consult each other and have better therapeutic outcomes.

Quality matters and not quantity. I also believe that hospitals should be headed by individuals who have studied ‘Hospital Management’ as a profession and not leave it to be led by a doctor or professor who has mastered surgery or internal medicine.

They are good in their field, probably best but when in comes to management, they may not have enough expertise to manage a hospital in the best possible way.

Having certain cadre as the head may also lead to bias when making certain decisions. We would really benefit from an independent knowledgeable leader in our institutions.

This for me, coupled with an attitude change is the starting point for breaking this cycle.