Patients die when quality of healthcare is poor

Dr Joseph Akwasi Boateng, Opinion Apr - 30 - 2015 , 11:21

The time of serious illness is the most vulnerable moment in a person’s life. For a parent, an adult child or a spouse, the illness of a child, an elderly parent or a wife/husband presents a moment of great fear, uncertainty, confusion and significant anguish.

It is at that moment that medical care should be at its most efficient, most compassionate, and of the highest quality. The outcome of the medical encounter must be the best that the medical system is capable of providing.

If a patient receives, instead, poor medical care and an undesirable preventable outcome, then the health system, the institution and healthcare givers have all failed him or her. They have not: “At least do no harm”.

Poor medical outcomes

Poor medical outcomes are also expensive and unnecessarily so. There are serious costs due to poor outcomes that lead to preventable morbidity and mortality.

The social costs are more apparent but there are very serious, less apparent, economic costs to individual families and the national economy as a whole. The wasted resources that are consumed in poor outcomes are direct costs but the indirect costs can be immense.

I sincerely believe that if we could accurately quantify the direct cost of poor healthcare and the indirect cost of loss of productivity to the national economy, the result would be staggering.

I believe that it would be far in excess of the costs of the carnage that occurs on our roads. Indeed I believe that a lot more people die of preventable deaths through poor healthcare in our hospitals than those that die on our roads.

Unfortunately the gory stories on our roads make the news; deaths in hospitals due to poor medical care are unseen and uncounted.

Human right issue

I also believe that poor healthcare delivery is a human right issue. I believe that every ill individual who enters a hospital, whether public or private, has a right to expect, demand and receive the best care that the institution can deliver.

As a society and a health delivery institution or healthcare worker we must all recognize this right and do our utmost to respect it.

I believe that our recognition and acceptance of this right will lead to the right efforts to do the right things both for the individual patient and also for a more civilised society.

The premise is that healthcare quality in Ghana needs to be improved. In some cases the quality is not only poor but patients are harmed either by genuine mistakes, negligence or downright irresponsibility by healthcare professionals.

What some of us are seriously concerned about is that not as much as needs to be said about the poor quality is said. Not enough is done. Bad practitioners, literally, get away with murder.

Unsung hearoes

The facts on the ground are that there are individuals; healthcare workers, health administrators and managers, healthcare policy makers, politicians etc. who are dedicated and working very hard to improve healthcare access and quality in Ghana. These are the unsung heroes.

I sincerely believe that the Government of Ghana is honestly working hard to improve access to both public health services and institutional care. But I also believe that in spite of the efforts of Government and these unsung heroes, poor quality, poor safety and patient disrespect bordering on human right abuses persist in the healthcare delivery system.

We want to shine a light on this poor quality with the aim of improving it. This will involve increasing patient awareness, public debate, patient empowerment and providing a platform where patients and their families can air their experiences and grievances.

I know that some healthcare workers will not be happy to read some of these stories and would wish that these things are kept under the carpet. That would be wrong because people die when healthcare quality is poor.

I know that the issues surrounding healthcare quality are complex and not always due to negligence or incompetence of healthcare workers. There are serious system problems. We need to talk about all of them in order to improve the quality of health outcomes.

The problems in the system that hamper even the most dedicated and responsible healthcare practitioners in such a way that their efforts to save and heal comes to naught need to be identified and efforts made to solve them.

There are also some issues such as the general scarcity of and the incorrect distribution of doctors and nurses, which affect the global access to quality medical care by some sections of the society need to be addressed.

My aim of talking about quality health outcomes is to provide a platform for identifying the problems in healthcare delivery, and proffer ideas for solutions. It is not an effort meant to criticise any group of professionals without reason or cause. It is an effort to stimulate public debate and discussion and to empower patients.

A better healthcare system will be good for all of us, our families and the medical profession itself.