NURS-FPX4900 Assessment 2 Assessing the Problem: Quality, Safety, and Cost Considerations Example Quality, Safety, and Cost Considerations

Various factors influence healthcare delivery, but chronic illnesses are the primary reason for the largely unmet demand for medical services. Inadequate monitoring of these factors can lead to a crisis in the healthcare system when providers cannot meet patients’ requirements. It is important to remember that hospitals and other healthcare facilities should routinely evaluate their preparedness to prevent problems like poor service standards, rising expenses, and compromised patient safety. Nearly half of American adults have hypertension (high blood pressure), per the CDC (2021), which might cause a public health emergency if not handled effectively.

There is also a current issue of nurse shortage, which affects the number of hypertensive receiving medical attention and the quality of care provided. Not surprisingly, most patients do not understand how to manage their illness and are less involved in the self-management of the condition.

Patients’ inability to effectively manage their disease, which often results in the development of additional medical conditions, has far-reaching consequences on the quality of care provided. As a result, this article will examine how hypertension affects the quality and policies of care delivery and will offer solutions for managing hypertension. Patients and their caregivers will benefit from this inquiry since it will detail hypertension-related issues that can compromise patient safety and strategies for addressing these threats.

Impact on the Quality of Care, Patient Safety, and Costs

The standard of care, financial costs, and patient safety affect how adults manage and treat hypertension; this is because having an inferior quality of life results from having multiple concurrent comorbidities. With more people seeking treatment at any given time, providing adequate care and teaching patients how to manage their illnesses effectively is more challenging than ever.

According to Melville and Byrd’s (2019) research, hypertension treatment in hospitals requires individualized care because it improves patient outcomes. Patient-centered care increases the hospital’s resource requirements. Because of the time commitment involved, a healthcare facility may struggle to keep up with an increase in hypertension patients who require individualized treatment.

Patients may have to wait longer for service, and some will receive a delayed diagnosis, slowing the rate at which their health improves. Other patients in these situations turn to emergency rooms, which have been shown to provide substandard care, to stabilize themselves until they can receive complete care, which takes more time and requires more appointments. Melville and Byrd (2019) claim that a rise in the prevalence of high blood pressure in a population is associated with a widening healthcare gap because some people are unable to receive treatment quickly enough. Since this is the case, approximately 37% of adults do not have their health status under control.

It is important to note that clients’ safety may be jeopardized in several ways due to the rise in hypertension, which causes the victims to be delayed in their hospital visits. Most patients do not engage in better self-management, leaving them vulnerable to the development of additional. It implies they will need to take multiple medications concurrently to control their illness. Medication errors are common when clients are sent home with unfamiliar prescriptions, according to research by Bhandari et al. (2021).

Any prescription error carries the potential for the patient’s condition to worsen and an unsafe adverse event to occur. When healthcare workers are overworked with many admitted patients, they may prescribe medications without first checking the appropriateness of the dosage or the possible side effects. Because of the potential for an unpleasant response and poor outcomes, this reduces the quality of care provided.

Goldman et al. (2020) found that the rise in patients with hypertension enrolling in Medicaid directly resulted from the program’s extension to cover pre-existing conditions. As a result, they serve more than 27% of all Medicaid recipients in the working-age population. It is worth noting that a similar thing happened with Medicare, allowing seniors to access affordable medical care. Rising patient numbers attributable to the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) Medicaid and Medicare expansion demonstrate that most patients previously lacked the financial resources to cover th