The VA Hospital - Research Paper Example

1.2 VA hospital History indicated that in 1990s VA hospital care system was very substandard. Congress were about to shut down the whole system and were considering ex-G.I.S vouchers for the treatment of private candidates. But, the present condition of VA hospitals is quite different. VA has one of the largest health systems in the country, having 1,400 hospitals, nursing homes and clinics. It has employed 61000 nurses and 14,800 doctors. This shows at a very small scale it have been able to attract a larger target market.

Out of 100 private institutions VA has a rank of 83. It handles the male patients having the age of 65, providing minimum risk of death i.e. 40%. Health care to these patients is provided on the basis of various plans or HMO’s. Harvard University has provided American government reward to VA for its various agency works. It deals all patients on computerized basis at very low cost. In past ten years, it has been noted that number of veterans has doubled in VA hospitals around 2.5 to 5.3 million.

The cost of per patient in VA hospitals has remained steady since last ten years. On the other hand, the cost in other private institutions has increased by 40% since last year (Dennis, 2003). 1.3 Historical and political effects During World War II, there were great advances in field medicine and body armor in order to survive in the battlefield. Number of patients was increasing very rapidly in hospitals. Research indicated that around 11000 patients were waiting for their treatment in hospitals.

VA officials had difficulty in managing such a high number of patients. Patients suffering from World War II were dying rapidly due to natural causes of around 600,000 in a year. Patients were occurring with severer wounds to VA. Due to this reason, this hospital introduced four more centers in the country in order to fulfill the shortage of health care (Waller, 2006). Reformation VA hospital made many changes in its systems in order to be one of the best hospitals in the country such as the hospital was reformed in back 1994, this was the era when Bill Clinton appointed Kenneth, a doctor from Navy as the secretor of VA health care system.

Kenneth bought an overall change in the entire system of hospital by lowering down the bureaucracy and providing authority to regional managers to make all important decision rather than dependence on higher authority. It enabled keeping track of all records through computerized network. It should be noticed that in this era only three hospitals had computer networks and VA hospital were in these numbers. This means that when a doctor is engaged in treatment of any patient, he have the facility to see the patient’s information easily on laptop.

While, in other hospitals nearly 20% of the lab test are repeated because doctors does not have any previous data on the test. Bar- code system VA invented bar code system in hospital, which is mostly used in supermarket stores for prescriptions. This system was used only in 5% of hospitals. It is a reader in the form of hand- held laser, which a nurse uses to scan the bar code system of patient waist with the bottle of pills. It there is no match between the two, nurses gets an alert. Institute of medicine have estimated that 1.

5 million patients suffer due to various medication errors each year. But in VA hospitals bar-code systems and