Professional Development Assignment 7
Michelle Turner
Aspen University
Healthcare Systems
N502
Dawn Deem
November 4, 2014
Professional Development Assignment 7
Definitions of the quality of medical care are no longer left to clinicians who decide for themselves what technical performance constitutes “good care.” What are the other dimensions of quality care and why are they important? What has changed since the days when “doctor knows best?” Patients deserve the best possible care we can provide to them. A patient or family may not always agree or like what their provider is telling them, but they deserve to have honest, excellent skilled, excellent bedside manner every day and every time. So how do measure “good care” in a …show more content…

This was maddening at the time, but after thinking about it and looking at it from the hospitals financial view, I saw their point.
According to an article in Health Service Management Research, there are two key economic principles that underlie health care priority setting. The first is that of opportunity cost, which carries with it the understanding that in investing resources in one way, some opportunity for benefit, through investing those resources elsewhere, has been lost. One of the keys in setting priorities, then, is to measure or weigh out the costs and benefits of what is being done (Mitton 2003).
Another principle is that of the margin, which is about shifting or changing the resource mix. If the budget increases, we could ask how best the additional resources should be spent. Conversely, if the budget decreases, one would likely want to take resources from areas that are producing the least benefit. Lastly, if the budget was neither increasing nor decreasing, at least not continuously, the question remains as to whether resources should be re-allocated (with some areas cut back so that others can expand) so as to improve benefit to the population being served (Mitton, 2003). The concept of the margin is crucial to the development of an economic approach to priority setting.
Health care is backed into a corner and it is our duty to educate others and ourselves about what we can do to reduce spending while still giving top-notch care to