Free Nursing Dissertations - It Should Be Noted That, Despite The Exemplary Aspirations And Goals Of The
It should be noted that, despite the exemplary aspirations and goals of the National Institute, there are still a number of question marks that hang over it’s activities and they mainly revolve, not around the Institute’s ability to make good evidence based and rational recommendations, but upon the Government’s ability to pay for the recommendations once they are published and put in place. (Shannon 2003)
The other major pieces of documentation that we shall consider in this essay are Choosing Health: making healthier choices easier (2004) and Building on the Best (2003). We shall discuss both in more detail later on, but in broad terms, both impact on the ability of the elderly to choose for themselves and to access the best in healthcare, which is the major thrust behind what the National Service Frameworks call for.
The Choosing Health paper is effectively a charter for Public Health consideration, insofar as it purports to improve health chances by allowing a greater and healthier choice to be made available to the patients. Amongst other things, it assists (in principle) the ability of a patient, or more accurately the patient’s primary healthcare team, to decide where a patient actually goes to have their specified treatment.
This distinction is quite important as it not only impacts on the main thrust of this essay, but it is also an important fundamental realisation that the patient themselves is seldom well placed enough to fully appreciate the subtleties of this distinction. (Lee et al 2004). The patient may well appreciate that they are referred to Hospital ABC rather than Hospital XYZ because the waiting list to see a particular Consultant may be shorter. The patient is seldom able to make the judgement (or to even be aware of) the fact that the waiting list in Hospital XYZ is actually shorter because the local Healthcare Professionals feel that it does not offer such a good service and therefore do not refer so many patients there. (Baggott R 2004a)
National Service Framework Standard Two has a stated aim to:
Ensure that older people are treated as individuals and that they receive appropriate and timely packages of care which meet their needs as individuals, regardless of health and social services boundaries.
It is headed with the concept of Person Centred Care. This is intended to allow the elderly to feel entitled to be treated as individuals and to allow them to be responsible for their own choices about their own care.
Central to this concept is the Single Assessment Process (SAP). This recognises that a great many different agencies may well be involved with the healthcare of an individual elderly patient.
