How health care is organized - Essay Example

Patients commonly visit primary care providers as compared to secondary and tertiary care providers. In case of secondary care, patients visit secondary care providers when they need specialized care services. For example: a person may visit a hospital because he/she may be experiencing cardiac attack. On the tertiary level, care is provided for disease and disorders that are very complex and need to be managed. Basically the structure of healthcare is such that primary healthcare level becomes the base of other health care levels.

Those healthcare providers who operate at the primary level tend to work on issues that already exist and solutions for these issues are even available. First the patient visits the primary healthcare facility and if required the primary healthcare service providers tend to refer these patients to secondary healthcare service providers. If the patient needs emergency care or if he needs to be treated for illnesses that are difficult to tackle then only they either directly visit the secondary or tertiary level healthcare providers or a referred to.

There are two models of healthcare organization provided by Lord Dawson during 1920. One of these models is regarded as the regionalized model and this model is profoundly followed by healthcare in most of the nations. In this model health care is divided according to the level of care required (Brown, 1992, p.67). In the regionalized regimented model, first comes the primary care level which provides care which is ambulatory in nature. At this level the healthcare service providers are mostly those who are general physicians and take general issues and diseases into their practice.

A very huge population of physicians in UK and other nations work as general physicians. The second level of healthcare is provided at the secondary level which mainly contains physicians who have specialized in some kind of medicine such as those who provide only surgery and those who provide psychiatric services. These physicians either have their own clinics or they work as consultants for certain hospitals and work on patients who have been referred to them by general physicians or service providers of the primary level.

The third level of care of the regionalized regimented model provided by the report created by Dawson is the tertiary level of healthcare and this level of healthcare consists of physicians who provide services for very complex issues and these physicians fall in the subcategories of the physicians of the secondary level. These physicians may include surgeons who provide surgery for cardiac issues and immunologists. The second model of healthcare system organization proposed by Dawson was the Dispersed Model in which a proper structure consisting of primary, secondary and tertiary levels do not flow as witnessed in the regionalized model (Bodenheimer, 2009, p.47). This kind of system is followed by the US health care system and in this kind of system referrals conducted by the primary level of healthcare does not exist.

In this model, patients either use their insurance coverage or their own money to make referrals on their own or can refer themselves to either one of the three levels of healthcare. In the regionalized system, patients tend to first visit a primary healthcare service provider, but in the dispersed system, the patient can directly access the secondary and the tertiary leve