Policy Change at Daisy Hill Hospital

POLICY CHANGE AT DAISY HILL HOSPITAL
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Policy Change at Daisy Hill Hospital
Policies help to shape organizational goals and guide the achievement of the objectives. They assist in identifying the key issues that affect a firm and how to manage those issues to achieve the set goals. They help organizations improve their consistency, accountability, efficiency, and clarity in performing their duties. In terms of consistency, policies ensure that the organization's processes do not deviate from the initial plan even when key members leave. In terms of accountability, they help ensure that the procedures are well followed to avoid unfairness or legal violations that some members may suffer from. For efficiency purposes, the policies improve the overall organizational performance by ensuring that everyone is on the same page in terms of expectations and issues. Policy changes are proposed whenever the current policies fail to meet any of these elements.
The Daisy Hill Hospital is an acute teaching hospital based in Newry in the United Kingdom. Like many other hospitals worldwide, the institution is under the pressure of handling the COVID-19 pandemic more effectively and efficiently. The pandemic has exposed the loopholes in many hospitals that need to be fixed, mainly meant to curb the susceptibility of the patients to die. The pandemic has revealed the need to develop a policy that focuses on primary care. The initial recommendation by the World Health Organization was based on system adaptations for the affected countries. Which mainly focused on secondary care and public health (Dickens et al., 2020). Primary care has received little policy attention in Daisy Hill and many other hospitals around the country. The hospital remains a high-risk area, with mortality rates at 40% among the patients receiving critical care (ICNARC, 2020). As the cases continue to increase, there is an urgent need for policy change measures to improve home-based care management and reduce unnecessary admissions that increase the limited hospital resources.
Current State of Primary Care
The drastic changes in the healthcare sector in response to the COVID-19 pandemic had an immense impact on delivering primary care in the country. There was a substantial increase in the use of telephones, emails, and other forms of remote communication between patients and caregivers. The new development freed the caregivers, allowing them to take care of only selected patients who needed urgent personal care, such as requiring physical examination. COVID-19 suspects were redirected to NHS 111 call centers for testing purposes. However, NHS 111 shifted the burden of testing and managing the condition and undermined general practice's potential to give continual and comprehensive care. The call center staff lacked total access to patient records and had limited information concerning the coexistence conditions of the patients and their home situations. Many patients lacked the opportunity to receive long-term care, which resulted in fatalities.
General practitioners have been responsible for the care of several patients under home-based care. However, the shift to remote working has r...