- NURS FPX 6218 Assessment 1 Proposing Evidence-Based Change
Proposing Evidence-Based Change
The global healthcare systems are useful references for the case analysis. Understanding multiple models and approaches to functioning in the context of health care can let the leaders determine what can be changed and what cannot be changed as the foundation for the change proposal.
As we examine the sophisticated and disbursed system in the United States of America, the identified nurse leaders should become acquainted with the programs and systems that provide evidence-based quality health care that is cheap and progressive (World Health Organization, 2020).
This form of assessment entails analyzing a certain healthcare issue from the local or regional to the global level. Funded by your organization in cooperation with other community stakeholders, an investigation into the possibility of enhancing the existing healthcare system in the local or regional context is being conducted.
Stepping into the role of a nurse leader who realizes the impact of health care policy and finance on the accessibility of quality and cheaper services, it is your honor to be a member of the study’s task force. By comparing other countries’ healthcare systems, it is possible to come up with objective data regarding outcomes and reference points (Schneider et al., 2021).
Executive Summary
There are problems regarding faculty and corporate governance in higher education, and this occurrence influences the faculty and corporate governance of Texas’ current healthcare system, including its accessibility, fairness, quality, and ability to address costs.
In this regard, this report suggests that Texas must embrace UHC in the coming years to solve these challenges. The objective is that everyone in a specific region should be able to use health services and receive the necessary treatment without facing financial distress, thus increasing healthier life expectancy and reducing health disparities.
If the UHC program is to be implemented, it would require the people of Texas to receive care appropriate to their needs, with the assistance of tax money and employers, as well as premiums based on their income. To this end, this change seeks to offer access to health care, decrease the gaps in health care, enhance the inhabitants’ health, and manage the costs efficiently.
This paper explores and compares the change experience of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, NHS, and Germany’s Social Health Insurance, SHI, to inform the proposed change in Texas.
The NHS delivers healthcare with complete availability and is implemented for free at the point of use, mainly financed through a tax system, which means that access to the care of the health system in the UK is universal with a comprehensive focus on the equity of achieving health (Grosios et al., 2021).
However, Germany’s SHI system is mandatory health insurance provided by employers and employees’ contributions, with extensive coverage with additional private insurance (Busse & Blümel, 2020). Both systems are characterised by a high level of care, albeit the NHS occasionally experiences issues with delays. Conversely, SHI experiences fewer wait times because of competition between insurance funds.
Local or Regional Health Care System for the Proposed Change
Current issues affecting the health care system in Texas include lack of adequate access to care, high rates of uninsured individuals, inequalities in health, and increases in costs. Texas is by far the state with the highest incidence of people without insurance, with about 18%. In 2020, 4% of the country’s population remains uninsured; the data has been sourced from the Kaiser Family Foundation (2021).
Such a scope of coverage hinders an individual’s access to vital health services, which results in an increased incidence of diseases that may otherwise be prevented. Health care in the state of Texas remains a challenge for many people, especially those living in rural areas and, to some extent, the urban centers. This is because the health human resource is periodically under stress, there are long distances to most of the health care facilities, and there is a minority of special care services available.
NURS FPX 6218 Assessment 1 Proposing Evidence-Based Change
This makes the state’s average uninsured rate a major challenge to the health care procedures in Texas. According to the respondents, people who do not have health insurance barely receive the needed medical intervention and, therefore, their health deteriorates, and they end up visiting emergency rooms more frequently.
Thus, the analyzed data show that Texas still experiences significant differences in health status depending on population characteristics. The minorities, poorer people, and people from rural regions have poor health standards, short life expectancy, and inadequate antecedent care. Texas health care costs remain high and individuals, families, and taxpayers are paying the price.
Desirable Outcomes
The introduction of UHC in Texas is expected to have some impact, considering its goals that seek to meet the existing problems in the state healthcare system. Such a laudable aim encompasses more people to be attended to, fewer uninsured individuals, equity in the distribution of health facilities, and tamed healthcare expenditures. Each of these outcomes is very important in improving the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the health care system in Texas.
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Increased Access to Care
UHC has its main objective focused on providing appropriate and adequate health care to all the residents in Texas. Thus, there would be no more barriers to care because everybody gets a insurance coverage when everyone is taken under UHC. This would include increasing the usage of preventive care, first-line, and tertiary care facilities, and medical therapies (Wagstaff et al., 2021).
Higher levels of utilization would mean increased correct diagnosis and treatment of diseases, hence embracing place of care leading to reduced disease prevalence and improved population health status. Provisioning of necessary medical services by the apartment for renters would also reduce cases of those residents frequenting emergency centers for basic services, which are usually lengthy and costly.
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Reduced Uninsured Rates
It should be noted that presently Texas ranks first regarding the share of residents without insurance, meaning that the issue hinders adequate healthcare access. Full implementation of UHC would also drastically cut the number of uninsured citizens because people will be covered by the health plan regardless of their employer or employment status, income, or health status, meaning preexisting conditions (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2021).
These changes in uninsured rates meant that more individuals would be able to access timely and adequate health care, there would be a decrease in rates of unaddressed health issues, and therefore, better health. Overall, healthcare costs would be less stressed with the number of uninsured people decreasing. Thus, the necessary resources would be provided more effectively.
The Rationale for the Proposed Change
The proposal to provide UHC in Texas stemmed from the realization of the massive failure in the existing healthcare system. The goal is to strive for an improved and fair healthcare system for every citizen. This justification is based on considerations of current difficulties that can be eliminated by implementing the concept of UHC in the state.
Addressing Current Challenges
Barriers to health for people in Texas include high and increasing rates of uninsurance, disparities in health status by demographics, inadequate access to care in the rural and frontier regions, and high and growing healthcare costs (Kaiser et al., 2021; Shi & Singh, 2020).
Such challenges instigate worse health, higher prevalence of preventable diseases, and financial burdens on individuals and the state government.
Many of these problems stem from the current fragmented healthcare system in Texas, which consists of many private insurance companies, Medicaid, and a fairly limited available safety net.
This leads to the violation of the patients’ rights given access to optimal healthcare by receiving care only when the situation worsens, seeking unnecessary emergency care, and facing monetary challenges due to medical costs.
The advantages of the Universal Health Coverage (UHC)
Implementing UHC in Texas offers several compelling benefits that align with the state’s healthcare needs:
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Improved Access to Care:
UHC would guarantee all of the population’s health care needs, ranging from preventive care to routine and aural or mental health care or even complicated diseases. Regarding timely treatment, UHC would reduce financial constraints and ensure people utilize appropriate healthcare services instead of waiting until they reach critical conditions and occupy hospitals’ emergency centers (Wagstaff et al., 2021).
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Reduction in Uninsured Rates:
Thus, with the enhancement and implementation of UHC, the percentage of people without health insurance in Texas would reduce since everyone would have full health insurance.
This would also result in fewer people having unnoticed and unaddressed medical issues, reducing the incidences of many preventable diseases and complications and optimizing the additional management of chronic ailments (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2021).
Comparative Analysis of the Healthcare System
Competition with Other countries’ health care systems; a comparison of potential UHC in Texas to Canada and Germany To more effectively assess the feasibility of the implementation of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in Texas, this paper will compare the proposed healthcare system with two developed global counterparts: Canada with its single-payer health care system and Germany, which employs a social health insurance model.
These systems propose different strategies for moving towards UC and serve as a source of knowledge regarding their effects on the accessibility, quality, and control of expenditure.
According to the case, Canada has a single-payer health care system, meaning that the health care services are financed by the government and available for the entire population. This model provides the required coverage to all or virtually all Canadian citizens and permanent residents and covers expenditures on all medically necessary hospital and physician services without levying charges at the point of service.
This approach is characterized by several administrative factors and, most importantly, measures towards controlling costs, including a fee schedule negotiated with the various hospitals as well as global budgets. These elements lead to obtaining lower overall health spending per capita compared with the United States, which proves the possibilities of centralized funds and single purchasing power within the healthcare system.
The problem exists in the single-payer system of Canada as well, which issues are waiting times for some elective procedures and inequality in access to specialized care in provinces (Canadian Institute for Health Information, 2021).
Such concerns raise questions about the balance between people’s coverage for health care services and their timely access to the needed services that might be useful to learn from Texas while implementing UHC. Texas can learn about potential improvements, such as administrative savings from Canada’s system while contemplating equalizing access.
Financial and Health Implications
The use of UHC in Texas has implications for the financial endowments and health worthiness of the state which ought to be evaluated objectively. In the financial aspect, UHC implementation may result in decreased costs with the help of solutions seen in such healthcare systems.
For instance, single-payer administrative control is recognized in Canada and operates cost efficiency through operational fee schedules and bulk purchases of drugs. Hence, by centralizing payment processes and utilizing the advantages of the scale effect, it is possible to restrain the ever-growing costs that are becoming unaffordable for individuals and states today. It is agreed that funding structures for UHC in Texas would need to be well organized in order to support full coverage of health services.
As the experience with funding from countries like Germany primarily through social health insurance could infer, funding could be by mandatory insurance, government subsidies additionally, and probably employer proportional to the employee’s wages or income levels (Busse & Blümel, 2019). These approaches will guarantee fairness in funding with the kind of efficiency required to sustain UHC in Texas in the long run.
Economically, there are some positive impacts, such as improved workforce productivity and economic growth. Thus, savings that can be provided by preventing absenteeism due to illness and the overall lightening of the household’s financial load can contribute to increased social well-being in Texas (OECD, 2020).
Such economic benefits could provide returns on initial investment costs through better population health and efficiency boosts, which could frame UHC as an investment into people’s health and the common welfare.
Conclusion
The change that can be proposed is the adjustment towards the introduction of the Universal Health Coverage (UHC) program in Texas as an opportunity to improve the accessibility, quality, and sustainability of the healthcare services provided in the state. Explaining the successful experiences of the countries that practice new models of healthcare financing, such as Canada’s single-payer model and Germany’s social health insurance model, has suggested that Texas can apply it to the local environment.
These are the processes by which financing should be fair and sustainable: better funding mechanisms, administrative efficiency noticed in other systems, and, more importantly, strategies that bring better economic returns along with healthier lives for human beings. The comparative analysis has signposted the possibilities of UHC, emphasizing factors like the efficiency of controlling costs, policies on enhanced access to care, and transformed health equity.
These findings emphasize the necessity of evidence-based policy planning and the consistent approach towards the replication of international practices to achieve a maximum positive impact on healthcare in the Texas context. Therefore, for UHC to succeed in the future in Texas, key stakeholders must be involved, thorough planning must be done, and evaluation also must be conducted regularly to avoid the problems that are likely to come with implementation. Read more about our sample NURS FPX 6218 Assessment 3 Planning for Community and Organizational Change for complete information about this class.
References
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