The Health Care system is broken in every country for low-income communities.
Hospitals are supposed to nurse patients back to life.
But most hospital rooms do the opposite. They are featureless, soulless white rooms lit by headache-inducing fluorescent lights.
One healthcare organization set out to do something about this problem. They brought in the prestigious global design firm IDEO to redesign the patient experience. The hospital executives were probably expecting IDEO to deliver a stylish PowerPoint presentation with creative new designs for the hospital rooms.
Instead, what they got was a mind-numbing six-minute video clip. The video showed nothing but the ceiling of a hospital room. “When you lie in a hospital bed all day,” IDEO’s Chief Creative Officer Paul Bennett explained, “all you do is look at the roof, and it’s a really shitty experience.”
That is one thing that is weird in hospitals, but everyone has accepted that fact.
Having a low income presents a variety of problems for families and children, with access to health care being the most complex and prevalent. Although there are many challenges for low-income families to access adequate health care in the United States, the key barriers identified in a review of literature are a lack of education, complications with health insurance, and a distrust of health care providers. Each obstacle is influenced by a myriad of factors that affect vulnerable sub-groups of low-income families. Acknowledging the barriers that prevent access to health care for low-income families is the first step towards determining future sustainable solutions.
Another problem is that we ( or the governments to be honest ) are still focused on building large hospitals, buying expensive systems for those hospitals, but is this still effective?
The COVID-19 outbreak has spread its feathers of destruction around the globe with high infected caseloads and many fatalities. People with comorbidities are more prone to contracting COVID-19. Therefore, going to a hospital or clinic for treatment and diagnosis is not recommended for such people. Home diagnosis devices are a feasible option to enable efficient care and quick diagnosis of patients with chronic illnesses.
The need for pre-hospital diagnostics and point-of-care solutions that can be used even at home is exponentially growing. COVID-19 showed us that we must provide a solution that can prevent over-crowding hospitals. The biggest challenges that Health Care professionals are facing
- The lack of monitoring the patients after they are released from the hospital.
- Up to 25% of care and rehabilitation expenses can be saved by providing an automated and connected early diagnostics system.
- Easy to use affordable diagnostics tool focusing on monitoring of critical injuries (brain, spine, kidney, liver, etc.).
Hence, the broad range of clinical skills needed to be prepared for many different types of patients requires high-level clinical reasoning and decision-making skills. Prehospital care may also be conducted in difficult environments, in all kinds of weather conditions, 24 h a day, and a long way from medical support.
The use of PoCUS ( Point of Care Ultrasound ) by non-radiologists is being adopted in prehospital emergency care. It may help healthcare professionals of emergency medical services (EMS) to diagnose or rule out potential life-threatening or otherwise harmful conditions outside the hospital. Prehospital point-of-care ultrasonography (PHUS) may have an impact on decision-making in prioritizing initial treatment and choosing the most appropriate hospital and mode of transportation.
When we’re busy creating PowerPoint decks and organizational charts, when we’re lost in focus groups and survey results, it’s easy to forget there’s a human dimension to everything we do.
Empathy doesn’t require any grand gestures. All it takes is a desire to see the truth instead of the convenience and feel what the other person feels for the briefest moments.
