Health Quality Care Administration - Essay Example

(Kilpatrick and Johnson 856-857). External feedback mechanism: Survey is the most common, reliable and valid method to gather feedback from external customers who mainly are the patients for a health care facility. The instrument of survey is a rigorously prepared questionnaire using Likert or Yes/No scales. Likert scales provide better perception as it is a labeled scale for e.g. patient attributes may be between 'excellent to poor'. A three to five point scale is used commonly while a seven-point scale is rare.

A survey may be telephonic or mailed (Lloyd 40-43). The most commonly used method to collect information from clients is survey. The survey is useful for assessment of services and product at pre admission, at the point of service and post service care. The advantages of survey are its generalizability, provides comparative data, and continuity of monitoring. It is easy and fast to implement. It, though, requires appropriate instruments and protocols. The focus group is reportedly is a small representative sample of target population.

It is a one to one and one-half hour discussion by the group of 8 to 14 persons implemented by a professional. The focus group results are usually compared with a survey result. One more method to hear voice of the customer is Observation, A least expensive method. The staff member closely watches the happenings at a location during a specific time period. Personal interviews provide rich information by direct interaction provided a skilled interviewer does it. An Unsolicited feedback is for what usually overlooked in health care for e.g. a patient not satisfied with something demands meeting the manager immediately (Lloyd 40-43, Kilpatrick and Johnson 701-702). c) Please explain the strengths and weaknesses of "focus groups" that are frequently used for this process.

The advantages of focus group are:1. A focus group does not require large samples it is a small group of upto 15 participants.2. The information from focus group is useful in getting quantitative data of the target population by a larger sample3. It helps in finding new concerns in the population for improvement of services or products accordingly4. It has very high flexibility on account of very small sample size (Lloyd 40-44).Disadvantages:1. Provide only qualitative information that is not always a representative of target population2.

Highly qualified facilitators are required else the results may not be of any use.3. It is non anonymous as it is obvious who is expressing opiniond) Use the text and Hospital Consumer Assessment of Health Plans Study (HCAHPS) website to create a survey that can be used in your healthcare facility. The health care facility survey are carried out for hospital, in- center haemodialysis and nursing homes to know patients opinion about care and services in these facilities. The questionnaire has 1-22 mandatory questions of a National initiative sponsored by the United States Department of Health and Human Services to measure the quality of care in hospitals and rest, 23-27, are on background of the patient.

This CAHPS questionnaire1 adopted by H-CAHPS is to get