HCA 340/500-Health Care Management

Discussion Board Assignment #10

Chapters12—Research:  How Health Care Advances and 13–Future of Health Care

Answer the following questions on Research: How Health Care Advances:

1.            Definitions of the quality of medical care are no longer left to clinicians who decide for themselves what technical performance constitutes “good care.”  Name one (1) other dimension of quality care and why is it important?
2.            What is the primary method of continuous quality improvement (CQI) in health care, and what is its underlying premise?
3.            Since an ever-increasing amount of research is funded by commercial companies, what is your opinion on a requirement for authors of scientific studies who receive income from these companies to disclose funding sources in their scientific publications?

HCA 340/500-Health Care Management

Future of Health Care Questions:

1.            Today’s not-for-profit hospitals and health systems are commonly multi-billion dollar tax-exempt organizations. What is your position on the new federal scrutiny upon, and reporting requirements for justifying the charitable missions of not-for-profit hospitals and health systems?
2.            In 1999, the Institute of medicine report, To Err is Human,generated a brief flurry of concerns about avoidable hospital deaths.  While progress has been made in addressing system errors and deficiencies, it remains inconsistent across the nation’s hospitals.  Fourteen years after this report, is it time for the professions, payers and the public to demand corrections of system problems in an accountable, transparent and publicly disclosed manner?  What form can or should these demands take?

HCA 340/500-Health Care Management

A-B-C-D Approach to Objective Writing

Writing objectives is much like writing outcomes in the nursing process. Objectives must be measurable, contain action verbs, be specific, include timelines, and indicate the degree to which you expect the learner to achieve. A helpful formula to write objectives is the A-B-C-D approach: Audience: Who is the audience for the class? Is it a student nurse? A staff nurse? A participant in a class? Behavior: What do I want the audience to accomplish by the end of the class? An example of a behavior is being able to identify the signs and symptoms of infection. Condition: How will students demonstrate mastery and be assessed in their learning? An example could be that students will demonstrate their knowledge of a lab or clinical area by taking a written test.

Degree: How well will students perform their new knowledge? Should students be able to identify all signs and symptoms of infection, or would it be satisfactory if they identified only two symptoms? A sample objective that illustrates these points is: “After reading this lecture (condition), the graduate student in the nurse educator track (audience) will be able to write an objective (behavior) using the A-B-C-D approach (degree).”