Sustainability of Chronic Condition Self-Management Support Approaches in Your Health Service - Essay Example

?SUSTAINABILITY OF CHRONIC CONDITION SELF-MANAGEMENT SUPPORT APPROACHES IN YOUR HEALTH SERVICE College Controlling chronic conditions are one of the most challenging activities in any health care facility. In most cases, all parties involved have to work without skipping any opportunity or the condition can prove to be fatal. Having been attached at a health facility in the southern Australia, there are challenges that I came through that made me realize the importance of self management in controlling chronic conditions. According to the department of health care and ageing, the behavior of people is one of the leading factors to acquiring a chronic condition. This means that change in behavior contributes a lot to the reduction and control of the conditions. It is for this reason that I undertook this course to ensure that it leads to knowledge that can help the local people understand their role in the development and maintaining their health. People have to understand that they have the responsibility of ensuring that they live a healthy life and that they can manage and reduce the risk of any chronic condition. This is a critical reflective critique that aims at identifying some of the ways that can be used to promote self management in patients with chronic conditions. The paper identifies various approaches that can be used to help promote self management in chronic conditions management (Lubkin & Larsen, 2006). To make this approach sustainable, there are several changes that need to be effected in the healthcare service that I am attached to. First, patients need to be educated on various ways that they can help promote this service through self management. This education should base on their lifestyles such as diet and activities that they perform throughout the day. This education needs to be given to everyone not to those with chronic conditions since it is a well known factor that lifestyle is a major contributed to these conditions. Education on various ways of managing self is one of the basic things that are required to ensure that the process is sustainable. Healthcare professionals also need to be educated on how to enforce this habit on patients so as to ensure that the process is a success. The patient has to learn that self management does not involve just the health provider rather it involves both the health provider and the patients themselves. The I don’t care attitude should be driven away from the healthcare centre to ensure that this process is sustained. The healthcare centre also needs to purchase self managements kits that patients and other normal people can use to check their temperatures, calories and their sugar levels without having to come to their physician. This is important in ensuring that the patients do necessary tests alone hence reduce the time needed to go to the healthcare facility for checkup. There are several barriers that exist that can prevent this process from succeeding. One of them is culture. It is a common phenomenon for most people especially the working Class to involve themselves in unhealthy activities such as eating foods with high fats level that is not healthy. They do this not because they want to but because that is the only available option that is available to them. Culture is therefore one of the factors that needs to be dealt with to ensure that this process is successful. The second barrier is the difficulty of people both the patients and the healthcare staff in adapting to change. Change has always been hard to implement especially in places where there exists different people to run the organization. It would especially be very difficult to convince the management to consider this shift. For example since most patients with chronic conditions are used to regular checkups from their physicians, it would be very difficult for them to adapt to the new changes that would require them to do self checks regularly. This would mean that most of the staff and patients would need education on how to go about the whole process. The other major barrier that would prevent this process is the limited resources that exist. Currently the organization does not have the required tools and resources that are necessary for this shift. For example, most patients would need to have self assessment kits that will enable them to do regular checkups without the involvement of the healthcare staff. The best self management approach that can be used in the healthcare facility that I work for is patient education and counseling. This is the best chosen method that can be effectively used in my health care facility because of a number of reasons. First, most of the people with chronic conditions in this facility are affected because of ignorance. This means that if people can be educated on ways that can help prevent these conditions then the problem can be solved from the roots. Another reason is that most of the staff does not understand how this process takes place and so they need education on facilitating this whole process. The staff needs to know how this process works and develop a procedure that they will use to ensure that this process is effectively incorporated into the system. Since the process is just beginning in the healthcare facility, education and counseling has a major role to play in ensuring that both the patients and the physicians know their exact roles in the process (Larsen & Lubkin, 2009). There are currently more than 50 clients that are served in my healthcare facility per month. However this number keeps fluctuating each year. The population has always increased over the past ten years with the diabetic conditions being the major issue at hand. The needs of the clients are currently met by the limited physicians available in the centre. The needs include checkups, counseling and provision of different medications. It is always challenging for the physicians to serve all the clients at the same time and as a result they are given different appointments dates and times. This may sometimes be hard as some patients are known to require urgent medication and so delaying their medication has always been a challenge. To cover this gap, self management is necessary to ensure that the patients can be served by the limited physicians without trouble. If self management is introduced, then patients would be able to perform their checkups alone and only com for major checkups with their physicians. This would reduce the frequency at which the patients come for checkup and so ensure that the physicians are able to serve all the patients. To be able to adapt to this new process, the staff would require special skills and resources to ensure that this process is a success. First of all, the staff has to be educated on how to monitor patients who are at home. This will mean that they have a strict plan for the patients on when they can visit the physicians in case of any problem. They also have to ensure that the patients follow the strict procedure that is necessary for them to live a healthy life. For example the staff has to prepare every patient an eating menu that they can use to eat a balanced diet and avoid contacting more diseases due to unhealthy eating. In this case, every patient has to confirm that they will follow the strict menu. The staff also has to know what types of food the patients should eat since the patients won’t be coming regularly for checkups. The resources that the staff would need include networked computers. To monitor patient’s performance, the patients would be required to enter their pulse rate, blood pressure and sugar levels in a database after every check. Physicians at the hospital will have re-carry checks to affirm that the conditions of the patients are normal. The information updated by the patient should be automatically updated to the system and incase of any problem, the system has to notify the administration about the issue. The staff also needs to know how to use this system and monitor the patient’s progress. Where there is self management, accidents are a common phenomenon. These accidents do occur due to over dosage or wrong reading and interpretation of results. There are also emergencies that might occur at anytime of the day. For this reason, the staff has to know the location address of the patient so that incase of any problem they can rush in to help them. They also have to have a ready ambulance at all times to ensure that in case these accidents occur, they are ready to go and pick the patients from wherever they are. Without an ambulance, the patients may suffer when they urgently need help Even though self management in chronic conditions is a very nice idea, care should be taken during its implementation. The physician has to check at the mental conditions of each patient to ascertain that they are normal before allowing them to perform any checks and medication on themselves. Incase this is not ensured, and then this process can be very dangerous to the patient and can lead to more trouble than was expected. Bibliography Larsen, P. D., & Lubkin, I. M. (2009). Chronic illness: impact and intervention. Sudbury, Mass, Jones and Bartlett Publishers. Lubkin, I. M., & Larsen, P. D. (2006). Chronic illness: impact and interventions. Sudbury, Mass, Jones and Bartlett Publishers. Read More