Improving the Health Care Delivery - Essay Example

"Improving the Health Care Delivery" is a wonderful example of a paper on the health system.

World Health Organization defines health as the state of thorough mental, social as well as mental wellbeing. Suitable healthcare provision entails all the preventive, diagnostic, and curative measures taken by both private and public hospitals to prevent people from contracting a disease or to treat those who are unwell. A sustainable health care system is the one that is accessible to all and includes the ability to insure all. The sustainability of a health system can be determined by considering the factors that are capable of making people healthy or not. These include how well the system has put in place processes to prevent disease outbreaks as well as manage existing illnesses. This paper focuses on substandard patient care witnessed in the health system. The paper includes an example of a practice demonstrating substandard health care delivery.

I was once a victim of substandard health services. The occurrence ensued when I visited a dispensary with multiple symptoms, which included severe headache and sharp chest pain, particularly while breathing. I explained to the doctor about my situation and without ordering any laboratory tests, the doctor diagnosed me with pneumonia. He thus prescribed antibiotic medications. I took the medications but the pain did not go but instead worsened such that I had to visit another hospital where I underwent multiple tests, which showed that I had bronchitis. I thus receive the appropriate medication after which I recovered. My case was less serious since antibiotics do not have very serious side effects. However, cases involving prescriptions of highly sensitive drugs do occur. The main cause of such cases is often due to negligence on the side of the person prescribing.

It is a common phenomenon for some medical practitioners to make assumptions regarding certain symptoms and make wrongful prescriptions. The side effects in adults might not be severe but cases involving children tend to be serious and lethal at times. It is thus crucial that medical practitioners avoid any form of assumptions to eliminate or reduce prescriptive errors. Additional errors in prescription may occur when purchasing drugs from the chemist, which is a common phenomenon. Medical practitioners should be extremely careful when taking prescription and should order for complete tests to ascertain that the medication given is right. Additionally, the health system should come up with ways of monitoring the dispensation of drugs by chemists (Murray, 2003; Healy, 2011).

Cases of negligence involving doctors may end up unreported but they are still common. Examples of prescriptive errors include cases where the doctor writes the wrong dose and patients end up getting an overdose or an under-dose. Another common error involves prescribing doses meant for adults to children, the erroneous dispensation in chemists or pharmacies, or cases where doctors who have made prescriptions for wrong periods make assumptions which may result in erroneous prescription (Healy, 2011; Murray, 2003).

Other examples of substandard practices in the health system include the inability of people to access health facilities in good time, high treatment costs, as well as the substandard performance of the caregivers (Healy, 2011; Murray, 2003).

Conclusion

The United States health system is somehow substandard and it thus requires improvement. Erroneous prescription is a common phenomenon that may involve the doctor or may occur at the chemist.