SJHospitalisapediatrichospitaldedicat...
SJ Hospital is a pediatric hospital dedicated to patients under 18 years old and based in Manchester, United Kingdom. It is a government-‐funded institution located in the western part of the city, where a lot of young parents have established themselves to start families over the past few years. Parents in the area are typically young professionals with a university education and comfortable financial means. SJ estimates that it is servings about 300,000 households with children in the local community. The hospital runs three pediatric services: 1. Emergency services. Emergency services are open 24 hours a day, everyday of the year. Children with acute conditions that require urgent treatment from doctors can attend this service without appointment. Most patients go to emergency services by themselves but some of them are referred to this service by their family doctor. 2. Inpatients’ services. Patients who have attended emergency services and have been diagnosed with a condition that requires advanced medical procedures (e.g. an operation) or prolonged monitoring are admitted to the pediatric ward, where they are allocated a room with a bed and become inpatients. 3. Outpatients’ services. Children with conditions that do not require urgent treatment but demand specialist advice or monitoring are referred to the hospital’s outpatient services by their family doctor. Outpatients typically go to the hospital only for their appointment and then return home. The hospital does not charge families for its services. Instead, it keeps a detailed log of all the interactions it has with patients, such as the number of emergency attendances and outpatient appointments as well as the quantity of inpatients’ procedures it performed during the year. This log is submitted to a government body called the National Health Service (NHS) that audits it and pays SJ for the services it provided to the local community. These funds are then used by SJ to cover their costs. The hospital has been awarded an excellence certificate by the NHS in 2011. The award of this certificate is based on two main sets of criteria: 1. Patients’ safety. This is measured by the average time patients have to wait to see a doctor in emergency services, the quality of the medical procedures in place at the institution and other metrics. 2. Financial efficiency. This is measured by traditional financial metrics including fixed costs, variable costs, total costs per patients, etc. The management informs you that a number of senior pediatric doctors have retired in July 2013. The CEO of the hospital tells you that he thinks this might have decreased the quality of care offered, but the head doctor disagrees because younger doctors are better trained. Moreover, there were a few instances where families were disappointed by the care provided to their children and decided to publicize the issue in local newspapers. This directly affected SJ reputation and had a negative impact on its finances, as some families then decided to avoid it. Due to these recent developments, the NHS has contacted the hospital’s management to inform them that it will re-‐evaluate the hospital’s excellence certificate in six months’ time. The NHS has made it clear that patient safety will be the critical factor to determine whether the hospital keeps its certificate. Your team has been hired to help the hospital maintain its excellence certificate. Which of the following statements is the most accurate regarding the hospital’s efforts to conserve its excellence certificate?
