The Theory of Comfort and its Application to Improve Patient's Outcome

Applying Theory to a Practice Problem: Part 2: Application of Middle-Range Theory to Problem
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
Applying Theory to a Practice Problem: Part 2: Application of Middle-Range Theory to Problem
Problem
Providing good and effective health care services to patients is the major concern of nurses and health care providers. Good and effective services ensure that patients are satisfied with the care they are receiving. Therefore, among the key performance indicators considered in the evaluation and appraisal of health care institutions is patient outcomes which measures the ability of health care providers to provide care in a perfect and satisfactory manner. However, patients can be satisfied at the moment and be disturbed an hour later. Informing patients about certain issues will not result in satisfaction, a satisfied patient is the well-informed and prepared patient.
In order to improve patients’ outcomes, healthcare institutions have gone into the extent of purchasing extra amenities such as custom-order room-service meals, big television screens, and VIP lounges to loyal patients. Since patient care involves nurses, some institutions have enrolled them in non-medical trainings spending extra time on these unimportant trainings. Others have customized nurse-patient interactions where nurses are ordered to use certain phrases and evaluating how they comply to these new orders. The whole healthcare system has jumped into this idea encouraging institutions to incur extra expenses in expensive consultants who claim to be providing phrases and other resources that can improve satisfaction score. Some have gone to an extra mile of hiring them to rehearse with the nurses to boost compliance.
The concept of “patient outcomes” has wrongly characterized patients as customers and presenting nurses as automatons. When some institutions have job openings, they state that they want a nurse who has “good customer-service skills” as a must have qualification. Treating patients as customers, hospitals can easily succumb into the culturally ingrained notion that customers are always right. Some healthcare institutions are telling nurses that patients are their customers and they are expected to provide them with excellent services so that they will maintain loyalty. Patients are not always right, they do not have the required knowledge and training to understand their issues. Another more troubling problem is that a number of institutions are using patient satisfaction scores as a factor for determining payments for nurses and other healthcare practitioners. They are ignoring the possibility of having excellent patient satisfaction scores but a higher number of patients who have never recovered or even dead ones.
Most health care institutions seem to be focusing on patient satisfaction scores by believing that they can make the patients think that they are getting a better care. This is likely to cost the hospitals and an increase in patient deaths. Patient satisfaction scores will never improve healthcare. However, research has indicated that employing more nurses and treating patients in a proper manner will accomplish that. Nurses are the primary key to pati...