The Towel Phenomenon Of The Health Sector

Every strand of the towel is as important as the whole unit as each seeks to contribute to the goal of cleaning the body. The part that cleaned the eye may sometime clean the anus and vice versa, do not despise any strand because every strand counts. It is no different from the health sector as there is a pool of non-professional and professional hand involved in ensuring patient safety and general wellbeing. In today’s health care system, there are numerous health care professionals with varying levels of educational and occupational training.

A patient in a day may interact with fifteen different employees including physicians, nurses, technicians and others. Professional communication and team collaboration helps to ignore medical errors that potentially cause severe injury or unexpected death. Established communication creates situations where medical errors can be reduced to the barest minimum. When health professionals are communicating accurately and effectively, patient safety is assured. Patient safety is at risk when there is lack of critical information, misinterpretation of information, unclear orders over phone and overlooked changes in patient status.

Aside chronic diseases that claim lives of patients and genuine death from clinical sources, medical errors also appear to cause significant deaths in patients. Medical errors range from communication failures, medication errors, delays in treatment and wrong site surgeries.

The multidisciplinary system approach to health is lacking in the sense that, clinicians are stuck glued to their area of specialization with little or no interference with other sectors of health. However, interdisciplinary teamwork approach is an important model for delivery health care to patients. The interdisciplinary approach interact two or more people interdependently with a common purpose, working towards achievable goals, that maintains patient stability with encouraging honest discussion and problem solving ideas. In the health care setting, teamwork employs the practices and collaboration and enhanced communication to reiterate the roles of health workers. With teamwork and collaboration, patient care is decentralized with a current health system with many levels of health workers, especially the use of meetings and other communication methods to discuss patient results, share information and debate suggestions to improve performance.

Cadres in health care are made up of variety of professionals each with specialized knowledge and responsible for different tasks. The goal is not changed as each cadre works to solve health problems of patients. So therefore the team of multidisciplinary profession of healthcare must inarguably work together, communicate often and share useful resources.

In Ghana where the health concern is to increase access to healthcare to diverse population, there is the need to incorporate team support to intimately understand the needs of patients.

Most importantly, education and training in building effective teams should be paramount and encouraged. Effective teams are characterized by effective communication, trust, respect and collaboration.

Let us add quickly that communication is not just verbal in form. In as much as the spoken word contains the crucial content, it is mostly affected by body language, attitude and tone. Hence critical information transmitted via handwritten notes, emails or text messages, verbal should be scrutinized for accompanying non-verbal cues to avoid serious consequences if there is miscommunication. Members of the health system must be abreast with brief, concise communication style understood by all.

Health care professionals in collaborating must assume complementary roles and co-operatively work together to carry plans patient care. Each member of the team is aware of each other’s type of knowledge and skills leading to continued improvement in decision making. Patient care is often individualized to best address the needs of the patient taking into account multiple assessment and treatment regimens harnessing each of the specialized pool of service in an integrated fashion.

The towel gets dirty even though it only cleans a cleansed body. This is to say that there are hurdles to overcome in the teamwork module. It ranges from making additional time from normal working hours, lack of confidence in the decision of others, territorialism and so on. Such hurdles are raising their ugly heads in most hospitals nationwide. However, most of these hurdles can be overcomed with an open attitude and feelings of mutual respect and trust. With communication being a solid rock fostering a good teamwork, patient’s satisfaction is expected to rise over sometime with families feeling more at ease with accepting treatments and being satisfied with their health care.

Generally, the health of the population is not determined by the entire effort of the health sector but by other social and economic factors. It is therefore important for the health sector to work hand in hand with other sectors such as finance, education, agriculture, environment, housing and transport agencies and ministries to raise awareness of the co-benefits of acting together for policies that promote health.

Inter –sectorial collaboration with synergistic interventions are set to significantly reduce adverse consequences such as in countering air pollution, improving health through policies for promoting access to education and gender equality. The focus is now how to create conditions for health professionals to work together in the most effective and efficient way to produce the best health outcomes for patients and their families.

For health everyone matters, the channel of help and support must not be compromised. From the mass media (such as television, radio, social media) which disseminate salient health information to the neighbor close by who may positively or negatively influence the patient to adopt a healthy or bad health style leading to behavioral change.

In our setting, the time interval patient is transported to the hospital to be cared for is an important as the care given as the patient comes by very important people who need to be health informed because every effort accounts for good health. The driver who has to meander ways through traffic jams has a duty to play in emergency situations because every second counts. Our security men at post are doing a good work but delays at gates has accounted for handful of deaths.

Education on emergency situations is paramount. The towel is encircled around the waist with folds to secure in place. The other significant group is the sanitary workers of the hospital in charge of most infection prevention practices; their work deserves much admiration as any mistake on their part can hamper good health results.

The patient, the centre of focus is set to benefit massively from effective management practices.