Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Cost Effective Health Care

Hospital visits with Dr. Shobha are always interesting. We see such interesting cases throughout the day. The CRHP Hospital is not like a typical hospital that exists in a lot of other places. Relatives play a major role in patient care; they bring food for the patient, support them and come to visit all throughout the day. The patients’ relatives help the nurses in patient care, which improves the healing process and allows for earlier discharge. What CRHP tries to implement is called Cost-effective Secondary Care.

I feel as if US hospitals are turning into a huge profit-generating machine. Many doctors put patients through unnecessary tests and expensive drugs resulting in their personal benefit or profits. In the CRHP Hospital, the pharmacy only keeps the WHO list of essential drugs and nothing too expensive. When people need further treatment, they are usually referred to a hospital. With this the Doctors have to know the cost of drugs and lab tests to choose the most cost-effective treatments for patients.

The medical personnel believe in people’s potential and try to demystify medicine. One surgery assistant that Dr. Shobha really trusts performs better than a lot of trained nurses and he only has a fourth grade education. Patients are charged on a sliding scale based on income. Only emergent cases such as Cesarian, burn victims, surgeries, snake bites and more are admitted to the hospital. Most of the care for regular ailments are addressed at home by trained Village Health Workers.

The hospital is certain that this is the best way, for them, to be able to provide low cost and efficient health care for patients that come in.

TTYS.

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