Health Care Economics. Terms: Quality, Resources Cost. Essay

health care economics. Terms: Quality, resources cost.

Quality, resources and costing health care

The modern day health care providers are subjected to incremental pressures. They are for instance required to best respond to the changing health care issues of the contemporaneous population, to the growing demands and expectations of the stakeholders -- patients, partners, the public, governmental and non-governmental agencies and so on (Wolper, 2004) -- and to do all of this with as little resources as possible. In other words, health care institutions are expected to maximize their output while minimizing their input.

In such a context, the health care community becomes focused not only on attending to its patients at a generic level, but also on attending to the multifaceted needs of the patients and doing so in a context of limited input. In other words, an ongoing focus of the modern day heath care community is on quality, resources and cost. The following lines explain each of the concepts in the context of the health care sector.

At the most simplistic level, quality is defined as the feature of an item of being good or bad, and the degrees of its feature of good and bad (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English). Within the health care community, the quality requirements are issued by the patients, who continually ask higher levels of patient care, increased access to medical services, higher commitment on the part of the medical staff and so on. Editors at the Institute of Medicine argue the general perception that the levels of medical care quality are inferior to those which they should be. Additionally, what is quite intriguing is that these perceptions are also obvious at the level of the medical staffs as well, not only at the patient level."Many patients, doctors, nurses and health care leaders are concerned that the care delivered is not, essentially, the care we should receive. […] Health care today harms too frequently and routinely fails to deliver its potential benefits. Americans should be able to count on receiving the care that meets their needs and is based on the best scientific knowledge. Yet there is strong evidence that this frequently is not the case" (Institute of Medicine).

As in other field of operation, be it private or public, for profit or not for profit and so on, in order to create high quality products and services, the medical field is continually in dire need of additional resources. The resources are generically understood as the totality of elements -- material and immaterial -- which are required in the completion of an effort. At the medical level, some of the most notable resources refer to the following:

Human resources (doctors, nurses, administrative staffs)

Infrastructure….....