Interrelationships in the Healthcare System

Topic: Administration
Words: 852 Pages: 3

Organizational Chart

Organizational Chart

The medical health care system comprises teams that work together to provide effective health care to patients. The system ensures that the professionals in various healthcare departments collaborate to enhance the quality of care. This aspect makes individual professionals work in different departments to ensure that they attain the common good of the patient in line with healthcare ethics and professionalism (Zajac et al., 2021). Several healthcare principles guide such interrelationships as they bind all healthcare professionals to ensure they offer the best of their service for the patient’s benefit. Therefore, all medical practitioners must apply the principles of medical care to ensure that they deliver the best of their services to patients, irrespective of their position in the hospital (Zajac et al., 2021). Such factors ensure that various departments within the healthcare delivery systems provide their services when called upon, irrespective of whether the patient belongs to their departments.

Interrelationships in the healthcare system are critical and inevitable due to the nature of healthcare issues. Most human diseases affect the functionality of different body parts, hence the need for healthcare inter-professional collaboration to ensure that patients get the best care for their medical conditions (Zajac et al., 2021). Individuals suffering from any medical condition may be forced to see different healthcare professionals within the same medical facility to ensure an understanding of the condition. Further, patients must be educated about the best healthcare management practice to maintain better healthcare outcomes. Such aspects make interrelationships in the healthcare delivery system increase since they are perceived to have numerous healthcare benefits in the long run (Zajac et al., 2021). The complicated nature of human diseases has pushed for increased departmental interrelationships across the healthcare system.

All the departments within the healthcare system depend on each other for effective care delivery. For example, a patient visits a variety of departments like the internal medicine, laboratory, mental health, and pharmaceutical departments before they leave the premises (Jayalakshmi et al., 2020). This aspect shows how departments within the healthcare system cannot work independently of other departments. As perceived in the systems theory of management, a healthcare organization operates as a machine with different parts that are interrelated (Jayalakshmi et al., 2020). Consequently, medical practitioners can handle cases from different departments to ensure that patients get the best care.

Some departments and staff positions function better in a shared services environment supporting all the different facilities. In such cases, the medical staff in specific departments can provide services to patients in other departments, enhancing the quality of care delivered (Jayalakshmi et al., 2020). For example, nurses work in almost all departments to provide patient services. In addition, departments like emergency, food and nutrition, pharmaceutical, and mental require a shared service environment for operations. Staff from almost all the departments work as a team to provide diagnostic and general medical services, and pharmacies must work together. Such departments are critical in delivering healthcare as they provide an adequate understanding of the main cause of the condition, which is critical for delivering the best quality care to the patients (Jayalakshmi et al., 2020). Therefore, professionals like doctors, nurses, lab technicians, and pharmacists work better in a shared services environment supporting all the departments.

Healthcare policymaking has a significant role in the control and management of the healthcare delivery system. Policies act as rules that bind all the healthcare staff together, making them operate within a specific scope (Pollack Porter et al., 2018). Such guidelines are, in most cases, used to provide a conducive working environment for the staff. Healthcare policies also provide protocols that prevent human error and poor communication in medical decisions. Health policies play a critical function in preventing diseases and improving health care services. Such an aspect is attained since health policies define priorities and parameters for action in response to healthcare needs, political resources, and available resources (Pollack Porter et al., 2018). In addition, health policies focus on keeping individuals safe and healthy through developing rules and apples at different levels of management.

Evaluation of policies at any management level involves the effectiveness of the policy in meeting the intended purpose. Different healthcare policies aim at attaining specific healthcare outcomes that are used as indicators of any policy’s success or failure. Once a policy is developed, it is applied in real-life situations where the main focus may be on a single population, a facility, or the entire systems within the country (Pollack Porter et al., 2018). The target of the policy and its applications shows whether it is operational only in the local, state, or entire country. Availability of information about policy and its perceived role in the system are among the factors in determining the extent to which the policy can be applied in the system and attain the perceived goals. Good health policies encompass aspects like the effective procedure for attaining effective practices with less confusion or overlapping roles, except in cases where there is only one medical practitioner (Pollack Porter et al., 2018). Therefore, the evaluation of health policies involves the analysis of healthcare transformations or adjustments in the system.

References

Jayalakshmi, L., SD, K. D., & Kumar, V. (2020). Interdepartmental collaboration in a teaching hospital–A force field analysis. National Journal of Physiology, Pharmacy and Pharmacology, 10(09).

Pollack Porter, K., Rutkow, L., & McGinty, E. (2018). The Importance of policy change for addressing public health problems. Public Health Reports, 133(1_suppl), 9S-14S.

Zajac, S., Woods, A., Tannenbaum, S., Salas, E., & Holladay, C. L. (2021). Overcoming challenges to teamwork in healthcare: A team effectiveness framework and evidence-based guidance. Frontiers in Communication, 6, 606445.