The Patient Focused Approach: A Better Way to Run a Hospital?

It can take 2 hours of hospital staff time to obtain a routine chest X-ray, up to 47 clinical staff may be involved with a patient during a 5-day stay, and only a quarter of total costs may be for direct patient care, so some hospitals are experimenting with patient focused care by relocating services such as X-ray to the bedside, training ward staff in a wider range of skills, and managing care itself by using multidisciplinary protocols. Potential benefits can be measured in terms of reduced process times and faster turn-round, but duplication of, for example, high-tech pathology and radiology equipment is expensive, as is releasing staff for training. Proponents say that higher quality patient care will result without increased cost, and theoretical analyses suggest that advantages should outweigh disadvantages. The more established patient focused units in the UK are now over a year old; practical analyses of their quality and cost are under way.