Crisis Management in the Healthcare Setup

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Introduction

In a crisis, you never get a second chance and the first impression is very important. Hospitals are faced with matters of life and death in their day-to-day activities. This makes the hospitals appropriate and in great need for developing ways and means to manage crises. Emergent situations such as a patient showing up in a very critical condition can easily upset plans.

Complete crisis control in the hospitals is rarely achieved since conditions are so variable, high-tempo, so evolving and very uncertain. No two conditions ever appear identical since each situation appears with an element of uniqueness. The hospital, with its multiple sections and departments, has the challenge of ensuring the high stake situations are always kept under control (Woods & Cook, 2002). Right from patient reception to patient discharge, the hospital personnel are faced with the task of managing emergent crises in the best ways possible. The ambulatory or the emergency department is a very crucial area that needs complete focus to manage crises.

Crisis management in healthcare

The healthcare sector, by extension, covers community health situations. The community, as a unit, is under the jurisdiction of the hospital on matters of health. Control of disease outbreaks is an activity that requires complete readiness just In case of an unprecedented outbreak. No individual has all the knowledge to handle any situation as a person. Therefore, this implies that negotiations, discussions and information sharing are vital in effective crisis management. The healthcare practitioners need to consult widely within and without in order to counter crises.

Areas of particular focus in effective healthcare crisis management are patient safety and care, patient communication, health information management, emergency management, environmental health, medication safety, risk mapping and organizational staffing.

Patient safety and care

The process starting from the reception up to the discharging of the patient needs much attention in order to avert any crises. Patients, as variables, need to be treated differently. Patients need to arrive at the hospital with their health care records. The records serve as guidelines towards effective Medicare. Records would provide the healthcare personnel with information concerning the patient’s prevailing condition and his or her disease history. This effectively averts any possibility of misdiagnosis. Crisis at this level may be managed through computerization of every patient healthcare record. Patients will not always arrive at hospitals with their records at hand. This is particularly of significance to accident victims or any other casualties (Nemeth & Klein, 2011).

Patient-care also applies to the monitoring of patients in the waiting room. If not appropriately monitored, patients can decompensate in health, which implies that their condition may worsen while waiting. The patients may also wait for very long hours and leave without seeing the physician or clinician, depending on their nature of illness.

Patient communication

For effective medical care, a patient needs to communicate his or her own problems. Miscommunication may mean misdiagnosis and consequently, crises. Miscommunication may be as a result of language barrier, inaudibility due to a medical problem or even drunkenness. Failure in communication can also result from failure to listen due to diverted attention. The possibility of having a translator for every patient who has a communication barrier may seem a little far-fetched but in essence, it is very necessary. A patient unable to speak audibly should at least have a companion who could state some background information about the patient. This may also apply to disabled patients. They include the dumb patients or the accident victims.

Health information management

Health information management implies appropriate handling of health records. Patient medical cards should be kept in a manner that they can be easily distinguished or identified to avoid loss or confusion. Confusion may be very detrimental since this may literary mean giving the right treatment for the wrong patient. This is especially important in managing the in-patients.

Emergency management

In the hospital setup, the emergency department is the most demanding section. The emergency department also covers ambulatory services. The ambulatory department deals in the transiting in and out of the critically ill patients. The automobiles used as the ambulances have no option but to always be ready to be on the move whenever prompted. The emergency department personnel need to be in constant contact with the other medical personnel. Information flow in and out of the emergency department to the other departments needs to be constantly steady.

The emergency department also needs to know when to make transfers to the other sections (Nemeth, Walter, & Wears, 2008). Transfers should always be accompanied by complete clearance and with the permission of the other services. Patients discharged from the emergency section need appropriate follow up. The emergency or rather the ambulatory department is a department that lies at the sharper end of the entire healthcare setup.

Environmental health

Working towards perfecting health without checking on the environment is like planning to solve a problem and forgetting to check on the cause of the problem. Proper environmental management means successful prevention of diseases and a majority of common illnesses. The environment is a friend when treated like so but could be lethal if treated otherwise. The environment can bear multiple health hazards when neglected. People need fresh and clean environs to stay health. Such issues as proper waste disposal, proper sewage management and clearing of bushes around homes are amongst some of the basic environmental care.

Environmental pollution is a current challenge to proper healthcare management. Air pollution, which includes noise and water pollution, is one of the forms of environmental pollution methods that have adverse effects on human health. For example, water pollution would imply impure water for domestic use and this has a direct connection to ill health. Environmental education is a vital tool in the management and prevention of pollution. Human beings need clean air and clean pure water for drinking and this is the main reason why they need to remain so. It is the duty of the healthcare department, through the community health department, to ensure that the community and entire population is educated on the need to have a pollution-free environment. This is a perfect risk management approach.

Medication safety

This implies safety of drugs and safety in the usage of the drugs. Drugs are a vital component of Medicare and should be handled appropriately in order to produce the expected and required results. Drug inappropriateness may imply a number of conditions inappropriateness and may be the use of a drug to treat the wrong disease, which points to misdiagnosis. Inappropriateness also entails drug contamination as a result of drug adulteration or improper storage. These two situations may result in a compromise on the quality of a drug.

Any drug that is contaminated or is of poor quality can never work appropriately. Apart from possibility of causing new infections to the patients, it may also result in under dosage. To counter this crisis, all drug companies need to receive food and drugs Act’s approval before being let into the market to sell their ware. This is to guard against fake companies producing fake drugs.

Drugs are appropriate when used for the correct reasons. Misdiagnosis leads to the use of wrong drugs. This could be as a result of poor communication between the patient and the doctor, a problem whose solution could be found in alleviation of communication barriers as earlier discussed. Drug abuse, as a result of addiction to a particular reason or lack of proper knowledge about the drug, can be detrimental to the life of an individual.

Medication safety also covers medical instruments used in disease diagnosis and treatment. Therapeutic machines such as the radiology machines should be used with caution. Improper fixing of parts could be very detrimental since the radiation should only be given in specific dosages.

Organizational staffing

The healthcare, as a body, interacts with clients through its staff. Organizational staff, in terms of crisis management, implies having the right people to do the right jobs. The staff should consist of qualified personnel whose selection procedures are meritorious.

Risk mapping

In order to avert crisis, one should ensure that he or she is able to prevent any possibility of occurrence. Crisis occurs as a result of system breakdown. The breakdown could be avoided in a way if not prevented. To avoid the breakdown, a possibility of risk occurring should be diagnosed earlier enough. This process is known as risk mapping (Hoffmann, Crandall, & Shadbolt, 1998). Risk mapping entails performing a situation analysis and this may involve going through the entire system setup.

Information is vital in risk mapping. This involves consultations, discussions, seeking advice and looking for material aid. Once the mapping is done, the issues can then be dealt with individually.

Discussions

The above discussion leads to the questions, why do these risks occur and what can we possibly do to make things more safe, efficient and even more reliable? My take on this is that research on this area of healthcare would be very vital and necessary. To do this, it would be very important to involve all stakeholders, bring them all on board and discuss about how to avert the crises. Prevention, as they say, is better than cure and before we are faced with a crisis, we should workout the symptoms. This can only be achieved through earlier diagnosis of the looming crises. Crisis management – in this case healthcare – starts right from care for the environment to actual treatment and handling of patients (Woods & Cook, 2002).

Risk management, which implies identifying and alleviating of a risk before it happens, is different from crisis management, which involves dealing with a problem that is beforehand. It consists of skills and methods required to identify, understand, asses and cope with a nasty situation. Sir Abraham Lincoln – former US president – once said that people live in the midst of anxiety and alarms. He then argued that crisis management had become a defining occurrence in the people’s day-to-day activities.

Conclusion

Crisis management, in terms of healthcare, always provides no time for second impression. The first impression counts and may be the only impression. This work impresses on the various areas of lookout of being able to put out a fire immediately and effectively. Awareness is an important tool in crisis management. However, it is said that one could never be completely armed enough to counter healthcare crises. Crisis management centers on managing a critical condition and ensuring that it never goes out of hand. A situation such as a disease outbreak is an emergency that has everything to do with control. Failure to contain the disease could turn catastrophic since lives are always at stake.

As it is always affirmed, failure to plan is a plan to fail. One would never want to encounter failure especially when life is in question.

References

Hoffmann, R., Crandall, B., & Shadbolt, N. (1998). Use of the critical decision method to elicit expert knowledge: a case study in cognitive task analysis methodology. Hum Factors, 40(2), 254–276.

Nemeth, C., Klein, G. (2011). The naturalistic decision making perspective. New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons.

Nemeth, C., & Wears, R. (2008). An agenda for healthcare team communication research: Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.

Nemeth, C., Walter, J., & Wears, R. (2008). The path to resilience in ambulatory care. MD: Bethesda.

Woods, D., & Cook, R. (2002). Nine steps to move forward from error. Cogn Technol Work 4(2), 137–144

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