1. What is Health Care?
Answer:
Health care refers to medical care that is provided to improve and maintain the health of a person. It is done by diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of diseases or illness or injury.
Health care is provided by professionals in various fields such as physicians, doctors, nurses, pharmacist, dentist, midwives, etc.
2. What are the different types of Health Care?
Answer:
Depending upon the types of care and services required health care is divided into three types:
i. Primary Health Care: The first contact for health care for most people is usually the primary health care generalist providing primary care. The people at this level are generalists. They are not specialists.
Increasing number of patients with lifestyle diseases call for more primary health care facilities.
ii. Secondary Health Care: The health care provided by a specialist is known as secondary health care. This is the second tier in the system.
iii. Tertiary Health Care: Tertiary health care includes treatment that is advanced and complex. Tertiary health care includes services provided for major surgeries such as plastic surgery, cardiac surgery, and other complex surgeries. It also includes services provided for cancer management, treating severe burns, etc.
3. What are the different types of health care services?
Answer:
Health care services are provided by specialist and health care providers are majorly divided into following categories:
i. Preventive care services: The steps taken to prevent a particular disease are known as preventive care. Here you are treating neither the disease nor the symptoms. These services include various immunization programs that help to prevent diseases.
ii. Promotion based Services: Generally provided by the government, these services create awareness and enable people to increase control of their health. In these services, health care education is provided to masses, people are thought about the basic hygiene which enables to prevent certain diseases etc. Anti-smoking campaigns, education about HIV/Aids, etc, all fall under this category.
iii. Curative Care Services: Here the main focus is to cure the disease and not to provide temporary relief from pain or to reduce stress.
iv. Rehabilitation Services: Rehabilitation services help people with disabilities to become self-reliant. These services fulfill the emotional, psychological and physical needs of the patients and their families.
4. What are the main competencies that are needed for health care professionals?
Answer:
Skilled health care professionals need the following competencies in order to meet the needs of the health care system:
i. Team player: Health care professionals need to work in interdisciplinary teams in order to ensure that proper care and treatment is provided. They need to cooperate with other team members and be good at communication to work efficiently.
ii. Patient care oriented: They need to help patients to relieve pain, listen to them carefully, educate them and promote a healthy lifestyle, identify and respect the patient's needs, provide customized and proper care for the patients etc. And, they can do all this only when patient care is their primary focus.
iii. Strive to improve quality: Continuously understand and measure the quality, identify mistakes, try to implement a basic and standardized structure of process with the main focus on improving quality.
iv. Continuous learning: They need to participate in research activities and provide optimum care with best clinical expertise and research.
v. IT savvy: Use proper information technology to manage communication and to support in decision making.
vi. Ensure that they use
proper evidence-based practices.
5. What are some important things needed of a health care professional to work efficiently in a team?
Answer:
The health care professionals should have a willingness and ability to collaborate with other teams. You need to develop trust in your other team members.
Working in teams needs them to understand the importance of cooperation, coordination and standardization. Here are a few more things you need to bear in mind while working in a team:
i. Have knowledge about the team member such as their expertise, background, and values.
ii. Know your individual roles and different processes required to work in a team.
iii. Have proper and basic group skills such as communication, delegation, negotiation, time management etc.
iv. Ensure communication is shared in a timely manner and that the information is accurate.
v. Even if the team members are in different location ensure patients receive customized care. Manage smooth transitions.
vi. Prepare an integrated and coordinated care process to ensure proper care is provided to the patients.
vii. Ensure there are no conflicts with team members. If there are any, resolve them.
6. What do health care professionals need to do to improve quality?
Answer:
Following are some important things, the health care professionals can do to improve the quality of services provided:
i. Evaluate current practices.
ii. Compare the current practices with others and identify opportunities for improvement.
iii. With the purpose to improve quality implement and test the new process.
iv. Provide proper training and implement basic safety designs. Have a standardized process.
v. Identify mistakes and take proper measures to rectify them.
vi. Have a self- assessment and change program for improving the quality of personal performance.
vii. Identify training needs of members to improve quality.
viii. Measure quality of care provided. Try to achieve best results in patients health and community needs.
