Human Resources Management (HRM)
Title: Medical Senario
Number of sources: 0
Paper instructions:
In this assignment, you will be given a medical scenario where you will be challenged to make the right decision. It is important that you interact with this scenario with complete honesty. The point of this exercise is to discover how you will grapple with accountability in your own medical career and the careers of others. Once you are done with the scenario you will write a short paper describing how you would maintain accountability within a medical organization. What are some of the incentives you would offer and what are some of the punishments violators would experience? What are some ideas that you have to keep your staff ethical and effective? What specific biblical principles support your proposed accountability process within the medical organization?
Please use the following scenario:
While working as a nurse at a very busy acute care hospital you find yourself in the following situation. You have been pulling four days of twelve hour shifts and on your last day you are covering for four more hours due to another nurse calling in. You are caring for six patients who all require various levels of pain management. Exhausted from the day, your supervisor calls and tells you that your relief has arrived in the parking lot. Your priority now is to finish your shift tasks so you can finally leave. You administer an opioid to one of your patients when another patient begins to have a seizure. Your team stabilizes the patient and looking up you see that your relief is here and you hand over your charts, do a quick briefing, and leave for the night.
The following day you are told that one of your patients went into cardiac arrest due to a reaction to the opioids they were given. They are now stable and should recover with no issues. However, as you read their chart you realize that you had given them opioids but did not document it and then your relief gave them another dose of opioids since they believed it had not been done by you. You have been a nurse for many years and you know both the importance of documentation and you have a pretty good idea of the consequences for not doing so. This now leaves you with a choice.
The patient is now fine and will completely recover. In fact, there is no investigation and if you do not say anything no one will know. You can simply go about your day as if nothing happened. So, what is the right thing to do? More importantly what will you do? Now before your Christianity and ethical opinion of yourself automatically kicks in, take time to reflect on some of your moral failings. All of us have done things that we are not proud of, things that we deeply regret and are ashamed of. Take time and reflect on why did you take those actions? Why did you make that decision? Could you make a similar mistake in this situation? What could keep you from doing the right thing and why? What would motivate you to do the right thing and why?
Medical Scenario
Accountability is an important virtue in health care services and it entails a state of being accountable where health workers become obliged to accept the responsibilities of their actions. Accountability focuses on the services and the results the health practitioners give especially to patients (Topp, Edelman & Taylor, 2018). To achieve accountability in a healthcare center, it is important first to note down guidelines and regulations that the health workers ought to follow. In this case, leaders in a healthcare organization should communicate the policies and procedures that they expect the health workers to follow.
One of the ways that I can improvise to improve accountability in a healthcare organization is through addressing poor performance from health workers earlier enough. Addressing poor performance at an early stage is essential since a health worker can improve easily before it is too late to make the performance right (Topp, Edelman & Taylor, 2018). Another way that I can improvise in achieving accountability in a healthcare facility is by coming up with smart goals. Every health worker in the organization will have specific goals basing on the role that one has in the healthcare organization. Developing specific smart goals is an effective approach in achieving accountability since it creates healthy competition among the health workers in giving out positive results.
Developing incentives can be a significant step in achieving accountability since it acts as a form of motivation. One of the incentives that I can improvise is offering rewards and promotions to the health workers who are improving in terms of accountability. Thereby, other health workers will feel motivated to keep on improving (Vian, 2020). Another form of incentive is allocating the improving health workers with vacations, team-building retreats, and extended work leaves. These programs will make the health workers feel appreciated for their accountability improvement. The Biblical principle behind the two incentives is that leaders should appreciate and reward the people they leading according to their good deeds.
However, it is important to develop forms of punishment for the health workers who fail to achieve accountability. One form of punishment that I can improvise on such health workers is making them work for longer shifts compared to other health workers (Vian, 2020). Working for longer shifts is unpleasant and it will encourage these health workers to improve their accountability. Another form of punishment scheduling a special follow-up where the health workers who have poor accountability will have to offer a regular update on how they are improving. This continuous follow-up is usually shameful therefore the health workers will improve to avoid it. The Biblical principle behind the two forms of punishment is that wrongdoers should be punished for their negative actions.
It is important to develop strategies that will make health workers ethical and effective. One of the ideas that I have to achieve ethics and effectiveness among the health workers is engaging them in decision-making processes. Engaging them in decision-making processes is essential since the health workers will air out their opinions on how they will perform (Vian, 2020). Another idea that I have in achieving ethics and effectiveness is that senior medical officials should set an example to other health workers on how to work effectively. The Biblical principle behind this idea is that leaders should lead by example.
Concerning the case where my relief gave a patient extra opioids and the patient resulted in a cardiac arrest, the best thing is to inform my relief that I am the one responsible. I am accountable for what happened to the patient since I failed to document that I had already given the patient the opioids before I left. The reason why it is important to inform my relief what happened is that my relief might be worried of what was the reason for the cardiac arrest. The reason why I have decided to take the action of informing my relief on what happened is to prevent such as scenario from happening again. In this case of informing my relief of what happened, I cannot repeat the same mistake of failing to state the whole truth. What can keep me from doing the right thing is that my relief may not take my explanation positively and end up judging me. On the other hand, one thing that would motivate me to do the right thing is my ethical belief to always do the right.
References
Topp, S. M., Edelman, A., & Taylor, S. (2018). “We are everything to everyone”: a systematic review of factors influencing the accountability relationships of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health workers (AHWs) in the Australian health system. International journal for equity in health, 17(1), 1-17.
Vian, T. (2020). Anti-corruption, transparency, and accountability in health: concepts, frameworks, and approaches. Global health action, 13(sup1), 1694744.
