HEALTH CARE INDUSTRY CHANGED
In the past years, healthcare has been experiencing a lot of problems such as prolonged stays, and lack of patients’ respects. Due to the cultural shifts, adjustments in policy, the cost of care and advance in technology, most hospitals have transformed towards a more patient empowered strategy that helps in prevention of infections. Health is not only driven by the health care, but also by everything which is not health care, for example, demographic and economic factors (Schimpff, 2012).
Health care industry has continued to evolve by improving patient care and changing from a fee for service to pay for outcome model of payment. Hospitals in the 1950s were quite different from sprawling health care centers that are very frequent in the twenty-first century. Some of the examples of changes which have occurred since the 1980s are: patient empowerment, avoiding smoking in hospitals and increasing the number of health care officers.
Increase in the number of health care officers
From the 1920s to late 1970s, some doctors were continually on call whenever they were needed to attend the patient. Some implementations’ have been done to change this bliss. A good number of medical staff have been employed to counter the increasing number of the patients who attend the health care facilities (Dziegielewski, 2013). They have continued to evolve their roles thus allowing for less expensive and greater specialization. Hospitalists whose their principal task is medical care of patients have got a lot of experience from the patients’ stay in the hospital thus handling them with considerable knowledge.
Smoking in hospital
Smoking is one of the practices which has been common in health care facilities in the recent past. Hospital staff had been only concerned with the real problem of the patient while ignoring the fact that patients could smoke in the hospitals. Separate smoking rooms have been developed. In the United States of America, a health care called Mayo clinic banned smoking in the hospital as a result of the research done which condemned that second-hand smoke had effects on other patients. Most of the hospitals now are smoke-free (Dziegielewski, 2013).
Patient Empowerment
In the past years, patients who received charitable care from the health care facilities had no right to refuse to take part in medical experiments, but medics could still maintain critical information. In the late 1960s, if a woman was married and diagnosed with cancer, there was a chance that she could not be informed of the diagnosis, but the husband could likely be told. But nowadays medics have tried to be transparent with patients about diagnosis information, treatments, and risks with an aim to develop and share decision making (Schimpff, 2012). Many changes in the hospital are driven by legislation acts which help hospitals provide efficient care at a price affordable to the patient and aim at offering effective medication that could help patients out of the hospital as much as possible.
Long Stays
In the past years, it was a common thing for a woman to spend a lot …
