QAAC in Nursing Homes The QAAC is highly regulated by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services …show more content…
Quality Assurance Committees have noted that when practitioner communication with the patient as well as other staff is of a high level, measurable gains in the health of residents occurred. There are strong parallells between healthcare ethics and provider communication levels. When a provider respect a patient’s autonomy their verbal interaction with a patient must be high. This is because the provider must provide full information to the patient so that the patient has the inforamtion necessary to make competent decisions. In addition, as this information is shared with a patient a deeper provider-patient relationship may develop which may yield greater insight to the provider inpromoting a patient’s beneficence. It would be much more difficult to ascertain what is promoting the best interests of a patient where no provier-patient relationship exists.
Additional Benefit of Strong Provider-Patient Relationships Individual patients are not the only ones to benefit from strong provider-patient relationships. The nursing home facility benefits also. Providers who know and respect the patient’s perspective are able to provide high quality input regarding areas where patient quality are at risk. Patients can sometimes see firsthand weaknessess in a process sometimes missed by staff. Strong relationships …show more content…
Allocation of resources is one of these areas. Clearly, positive provider-staff relationships benefit nursing home residents. In addition, from an ethical perspective resources should be allocated fairly and all residents should have access to facility staff. Yet, nursing homes may have issuse with staffing turnover which makes it more difficult to develop strong staff-resident relationships (Ludwick & Silva, 2014).
In additon, this turnover may also lead to facilities hiring less qualified staff due to lack of more qualified applicants. From an ethics perspective, nursing facility staff should treat all residents the same as justice and beneficence would dictate. Yet there can exist a stereotype among nurses towards the aged which would lead to biases about the aging (Ludwick & Silva, 2014). Continuing quality assurance would require staff to be trained in elder care to insure ethics issues are upheld in potentially biased elder care.
Conclusion
Ethics plays an integral part in continueing quality assurance efforts in nursing facilities. For high quality care to be provided, the ethical standards of all staff must be beyond repute. None of the ethics principles of autonomy, beneficence, non-malficence or justice can be disregarded in elder care if care standards are to be of