3-2 Final Project Milestone One: A Gap in Chronic Disease Care

A Gap in Chronic Disease Care
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Introduction
The topic of my paper is a gap in quality related to care coordination for individuals with chronic illnesses. According to Sharon Valente, insufficient patient care coordination has increased the costs of chronic disease management by 200 percent. In addition to these increased costs, the lack of communication and cooperation between doctors and patients has caused problems for the entire society. Sometimes patients do not describe their health status to the doctors or nurses in a proper way, and thus the healthcare professionals are unable to provide them with the required treatments or medications. Similarly, if doctors or nurses ignore their clients with arthritis, cancer, asthma, COPD, hepatitis, HIV/AIDA and diabetes, then the patients may never get recovered at a fast speed. That eventually puts an extra financial burden on the hospital management, and their reputation gets damaged to an extent. Patients must be provided with enough treatment and recovery options, and the gap in care coordination has to be filled on an immediate basis (Valente, 2011).
The History of this Gap in Access to Healthcare
Since the 19th century, numerous cases of lack of coordination between patients with chronic diseases and healthcare professionals have been reported. In the 1990s, over 12,000 patients in the United States reportedly lost their lives as they were not provided with required healthcare facilities. In those days, only a few patients used to receive timely treatment and cooperation from their doctors and nurses. The situation took a more serious form in the 20th century in the government hospitals, where patients complained about the lack of facilities. Many of them switched to private clinics to be assured of health and fast recovery from the illness. According to A. Clarke, poor patients are more ignored by their care providers than the rich patients. It has tremendously reduced the care quality for chronic disease patients and increased costs in recent years. In any hospital, whether government or private, patients should be treated without any discrimination, and it is the responsibility of the government to take relevant measures as soon as possible (Clarke, ...