Research Paper on Healthcare Risks

Introduction

As the world healthcare system broadens in nature, offering more advanced treatments and reaching more lives, some unforeseen challenges keep unfolding due to poor management of risks. When risks are not regularly monitored and corrected where possible, in every organization, most adverse effects arise and hinder the progress of the organization. Therefore, risk management is a fundamental element of good management practice. The primary objective of the research is to determine the main risks that are associated with the private hospitals in Australia. It specifically answers the question why managers of private hospitals need to work more cautiously to avert the below risks; organizational culture discrimination, breaches of the code of practice, shortage of staff, reputation, and many more to ensure the growth and effective service delivery in the healthcare sector is attained.

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Breaches of the Code of Practice

The code of practice offers practical guidance to any individual or body that performs duties or functions to encourage best the practice provided in any organization (Poole & Cook 2011). The absence of the code of practice that guides the staff of any organization against doing unethical, or rather misbehaving in some manner can lead to blurred professionalism. According to the decision made by Australian information commissioner, it highlights how blurred boundaries may cause the medical practitioner to breach the code of practice in the healthcare facilities. It demonstrates how one sentence in an email causes the medical practitioner to breach two clauses of the secrecy legislation. Blurred boundaries more often occur in the healthcare facility when treating friends or associates patients (Poole & Cook 2011). The case enlightens the need for medical practitioners to be cautious when preserving professional limits and the confidentiality and secrecy of the health information.

In Australia, there is a case of blurred boundaries between a patient and a doctor. The two were also friends by their common faith. After the doctor treated the patient for an anxiety-related condition a few years back, a case of blurred boundaries and the "reply all" button arise among the two consociates when they were involved in a sequence of doctrinal deliberations, both through electronic mail and in person, about the ailing individual's resolution to resign his faith (Fallowfield et al. 2014). The argument went sore and the doctor concerned about the patient's welfare, more often recommend the patient to visit a psychiatrist for treatment. Therefore, this condition crested in the patient sending an email to the physician along with other six addressees calling for an answer to some questions concerning conviction. The doctor responded to them all suggesting that the patient should not be deceived to the issues in question. On the same note, the doctor included a statement about the patient's treatment for delusional dejection. The doctor replying to all, including the six recipients, made him breach the privacy rule. Therefore, the patient seeks compensation for the damage to his social standing, business, and reputation for revealing his information regarding health with malicious intention. The medic practitioner was ordered to pay the patient as compensation for disclosing the patient's private information to other persons. The case demonstrates various fundamental lessons for the medic practitioners and educates them on the importance of upholding ethics in the workplace.

Shortage of Staff

Staff shortage arises due to inadequate finance to run the facility, and therefore, doctors and nurses are overworked. The possible effects are directed to the patients owing to possible errors committed to them and less time while attending to them. Currently, Australia is facing shortage and underutilization of doctors and nurses. Private hospitals are experiencing challenges in recruiting and retaining skilled nurses due to the poor working environment. The research shows that there is no constant ratio between the nurses and the patients, and 75% of nurses are explaining terminating their jobs. The findings suggested that the shortage is concealed because the nursing data is inadequate and incomplete. The patient care quality offered by the nurse workforce was generally affected. It was argued that the management is reacting to a shortfall in specialties through the allocation of duties to non-medical practitioners or unqualified ones in sensitive departments.

According to the ANMF (Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation), nurse shortage has adversely compromised patients' care (Mayfield 2017). The branch argued that the deficit has also forced the nurses to reduce or stop the admissions to the facilities beds per the staffing availability. This step ideally has put the life of the entire patients into a threat because no human can control the ailment unless with the help of the medical practitioner, which in this case, is controlled. Therefore, to cope with the problem, more skilled medical practitioners should be recruited to help reduce the shortage and ensure the private hospitals provide the best quality patient care.

Organizational Culture Discrimination

Measuring of discrimination in a clinical setting is very difficult, though it has been proved to be a significant cause of cultural health disparities. Discrimination here pertains to those health consequences that are attributed to socio-economic setting and ethnically patterned beliefs and behaviors of the population that is being examined. In a clinical setting, health consequences arising from differential treatment based on ethnicity remains the main worrying possibilities since it's indicatory of favoritism. The deliberate action determined by the medic's perceptions on the personal characteristics of the patient such as gender, religion, ethnicity, race, and age beyond and above their medical relevance objective, leads to a bad health consequence unlike when the patient was treated based on their clinical presentation alone (Allotey, Reidpath & Manderson 2002). Moreover, the medics at some point have the problem in understanding the patient's glitches when there is a communication obstruction. The practitioner may perceive that the patient in demanding and thus do all sorts of inappropriate behaviors. The medics feel improper to handle them owing to the perception they create when most of the problems could have been otherwise avoided if at all there could be an interpreter.

On a few occasions, when the patient does not fluently speak in English, their care plan is written that they do not entirely understand English. In this case, the patient can express himself, but the staff or medic had the problem understanding the accent. Some staff at some point may respond by treating the patients in an arrogant and abusive way that afterward make the patients feel intimidated and disempowered. Equally, just as in the patient's case, staff members with accented English also have got difficulty when communicating with other workers and managers. Some medics who aren't native English speakers are considered to be incompetent and marginalized. They are seriously discriminated by other with the notion that getting information from them is difficult due to the communication problem, which is not the case (Ashcraft & Allen 2003). Therefore, hiring a translator/ interpreter could help in minimizing the issues with the discrimination.

References

Allotey, P., Reidpath, D. and Manderson, L., 2002. Addressing cultural diversity in Australian health services. Health Promotion Journal of Australia: Official Journal of Australian Association of Health Promotion Professionals, 13(2), p.29.

Avant mutual group, Blurred professional boundaries results in doctor email privacy breach, Avant mutual group. [Online] (updated 2016) available at:https://www.avant.org.au/news/blurred-professional-boundaries-results-in-gp-email-privacy-breach/

Ashcraft K and Allen B (2003) The racial foundation of organizational communication. Communication Theory 13:5-38.

Centre for Culture Ethnicity and Health (2003) Diversity in Hospitals: responding to the needs of patient and client groups from non-English speaking backgrounds. Policy and resource guide. Report prepared by the Acute Diversity Care Collaboration Program. Melbourne: Centre for Culture Ethnicity and Health.

Fallowfield, L., Guarneri, V., Ozturk, M.A., May, S. and Jenkins, V., 2014. Blurring of boundaries in the doctor-patient relationship. The Lancet Oncology, 15(13), pp.1423-1424.Mayfield, L., 2017. Nurse shortage for Upper Spencer Gulf hospitals. [Online] (updated 2017) Available at: https://www.transcontinental.com.au/story/4934835/staff-shortage-in-hospitals/

Poole, R. and Cook, C.C., 2011. Praying with a patient constitutes a breach of professional boundaries in psychiatric practice. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 199(2), pp.94-98.