Consumer Incentives - Essay Example

Consumer Incentives The role of public policy in healthcare s constitutes setting quality and safety standards for healthcare contexts, providing guidelines for educational requirements for handling patients, and monitoring healthcare financing and delivery. The economic challenges of running a nursing home include risk and uncertainties, complexities related to insurance, the pressure to reduce costs, rapid and confusing course of technical and institutional changes, and perils caused by information asymmetries.

All citizens demand healthcare services; therefore, the government intervenes by supporting healthcare facilities (Lee, 2009). The government may give economic incentives to healthcare providers through tax-free imports of medical facilities, tax holidays, and financial support with the aim of improving the quality of healthcare. The nursing home can signal the quality of its services to customers by hiring adequate number of nurses, ensuring nurses are educationally and clinically prepared, availing sufficient resources for service provision and informing the public about the quality of services through the media.

Socio-cultural factors play a role in shaping the perceptions of people and their responses to health problems (Lee, 2009). Additionally, socio-cultural factors such as religious beliefs, cultural diversities, people’s customs, and risk-taking attitudes are critical in understanding societal and population processes such as the status of morbidity, survival, and mortality. Hiring adequate number of nurses is the best method of communicating the quality of service to the potential customers.

When customers observe nurses working without strain, they develop confidence and expectations about getting personalized attention in the facility (Wang, Probst, Stoskopf, Sanders & McTigue, 2011). Moderate workload is the best way of ensuring quality service delivery because nurses are not in hurry when attending to patients.ReferenceLee, R. H. (2009). Economics for health care managers (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: Health Care Administration Press.Wang, J.-Y., Probst, J. C., Stoskopf, C. H., Sanders, J. M., & McTigue, J. F. (2011).

Information asymmetry and performance tilting in hospitals: a national empirical study. Health Economics, 20(12), 1487-1506.