Assignment

Memorial Hospital

Read the "Memorial Hospital" case study in Chapter 4 of your text. In a three- to four-page paper, respond to the guided response below.

• Discuss ways that a hospital might measure quality. Be sure to explain your reasoning.

• Explain the potential costs and failures of quality for Memorial Hospital and discuss how each can be measured.

• Discuss ideas or techniques from TQM that Janice could use to help Memorial focus on providing quality health care.

• Analyze the methods Memorial could use to assess the quality of health care it is providing.

Your paper should be in paragraph form (avoid the use of bullet points) and supported with the concepts outlined in your text and additional scholarly sources.

Submit your three page paper (not including the title and reference pages). Your paper must be formatted according to APA style as outlined.

Case study

Memorial Hospital is a privately owned 600-bed facility. The hospital provides abroad range of health care services, including complete laboratory and X-rayfacilities, an emergency room, an intensive care unit, a cardiac care unit, and apsychiatric ward. Most of these services are provided by several other hospitals inthe metropolitan area. Memorial has purposely avoided getting involved in anyspecialized fields of medicine or obtaining very specialized diagnostic equipmentbecause it was felt that such services would not be cost-effective. The GeneralHospital, located only a few miles from Memorial, is affiliated with the local School ofMedicine and offers up-to-date services in those specialized areas. Instead of tryingto compete with General Hospital to provide special services, Memorial Hospital hasconcentrated on offering high-quality general health care at an affordable price.Compared with the much larger General Hospital, Memorial stresses close personalattention to each patient from a nursing staff that cares about its work. In fact, thehospital has begun to place ads in newspapers and on television, stressing itspatient-oriented care.

However, the hospital's administrator, Janice Fry, is concerned about whether thehospital can really deliver on its promises, and worries that failure to provide thelevel of health care patients expect could drive patients away. Janice met recentlywith the hospital's managerial personnel to discuss her concerns. The meetingraised some questions about how the hospital's quality of health care could beassured. Jessica Tu, director of nursing, raised the question, "How do we measurethe quality of health care? Do we give patients a questionnaire when they leave,asking if they were happy here? That does not seem to answer the questionbecause we could make a patient happy, but give them lousy health care." Severalother questions were asked concerning the hospital's efforts to keep costs down.Some people were concerned that an emphasis on costs would be detrimental toquality. They argued that when a person's life is at stake, costs should not be ofconcern.

After the meeting, Janice began thinking about these questions. She rememberedreading recently that some companies were using total quality management (TQM)to improve their quality. She liked the idea-if it could be used in a hospital.