Primary Care Essay Example
State your PICOT question.
Indicate in parentheses after each segment, what part of PICOT the preceding words represent.
For example: In patients recently discharged from the hospital following care for heart failure (P), do hand-off calls by the nurse to the primary care provider using the SBAR format (situation, background, assessment, recommendation) (I) compared to no calls (C) decrease readmission rates (O) over a one year period (T).
Provide feedback to your classmates that focuses on:
The use of correct PICOT format for the question to guide the literature search.Primary Care Essay Example
Does the question reflect a clinical issue and one appropriate for an evidence-based practice project?
Provide feedback to your classmates that focuses on:
The use of correct PICOT format for the question to guide the literature search.
Does the question reflect a clinical issue and one appropriate for an evidence-based practice project?
Support a minimum of one and challenge a minimum of one.
As you work on your capstone project proposal, you will want to share your progress with your peers and instructor and seek or provide guidance or share insights.Primary Care Essay Example
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.Primary Care Essay Example
Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.
Primary Care
In defining primary care, it is necessary to describe the nature of services provided to patients, as well as to identify who are the primary care providers. The domain of primary care includes the primary care physician, other physicians who include some primary care services in their practices, and some non-physician providers. However, central to the concept of primary care is the patient. Therefore, such definitions are incomplete without including a description of the primary care practice.Primary Care Essay Example
The following five definitions relating to primary care should be taken together. They describe the care provided to the patient, the system of providing such care, the types of physicians whose role in the system is to provide primary care, and the role of other physicians, and non-physicians, in providing such care. Taken together they form a framework within which patients will have access to efficient and effective primary care services of the highest quality.
Definition #1 – Primary Care
Primary care is that care provided by physicians specifically trained for and skilled in comprehensive first contact and continuing care for persons with any undiagnosed sign, symptom, or health concern (the “undifferentiated” patient) not limited by problem origin (biological, behavioral, or social), organ system, or diagnosis.
Primary care includes health promotion, disease prevention, health maintenance, counseling, patient education, diagnosis and treatment of acute and chronic illnesses in a variety of health care settings (e.g., office, inpatient, critical care, long-term care, home care, day care, etc.). Primary care is performed and managed by a personal physician often collaborating with other health professionals, and utilizing consultation or referral as appropriate.Primary care provides patient advocacy in the health care system to accomplish cost-effective care by coordination of health care services. Primary care promotes effective communication with patients and encourages the role of the patient as a partner in health care.
Definition #2 – Primary Care Practice
A primary care practice serves as the patient’s first point of entry into the health care system and as the continuing focal point for all needed health care services. Primary care practices provide patients with ready access to their own personal physician, or to an established back-up physician when the primary physician is not available.Primary Care Essay Example
Primary care practices provide health promotion, disease prevention, health maintenance, counseling, patient education, diagnosis and treatment of acute and chronic illnesses in a variety of health care settings (e.g., office, inpatient, critical care, long-term care, home care, day care, etc.).
Primary care practices are organized to meet the needs of patients with undifferentiated problems, with the vast majority of patient concerns and needs being cared for in the primary care practice itself. Primary care practices are generally located in the community of the patients, thereby facilitating access to health care while maintaining a wide variety of specialty and institutional consultative and referral relationships for specific care needs. The structure of the primary care practice may include a team of physicians and non-physician health professionals.
Definition #3 – Primary Care Physician
A primary care physician is a specialist in Family Medicine, Internal Medicine or Pediatrics who provides definitive care to the undifferentiated patient at the point of first contact, and takes continuing responsibility for providing the patient’s comprehensive care. This care may include chronic, preventive and acute care in both inpatient and outpatient settings. Such a physician must be specifically trained to provide comprehensive primary care services through residency or fellowship training in acute and chronic care settings.
Primary care physicians devote the majority of their practice to providing primary care services to a defined population of patients. The style of primary care practice is such that the personal primary care physician serves as the entry point for substantially all of the patient’s medical and health care needs – not limited by problem origin, organ system, or diagnosis. Primary care physicians are advocates for the patient in coordinating the use of the entire health care system to benefit the patient.Primary Care Essay Example
Definition #4 – Non-Primary Care Physicians Providing Primary Care Services
Physicians who are not trained in the primary care specialties of family medicine, general internal medicine, or general pediatrics may sometimes provide patient care services that are usually delivered by primary care physicians. These physicians may focus on specific patient care needs related to prevention, health maintenance, acute care, chronic care or rehabilitation. These physicians, however, do not offer these services within the context of comprehensive, first contact and continuing care.
The contributions of physicians who deliver some services usually found within the scope of primary care practice may be important to specific patient needs. However, the absence of a full scope of training in primary care requires that these individuals work in close consultation with fully-trained, primary care physicians. An effective system of primary care may utilize these physicians as members of the health care team with a primary care physician maintaining responsibility for the function of the health care team and the comprehensive, ongoing health care of the patient.
There is no shortage of ideas for improving the state of health care delivery globally, but the challenges come once these ideas “leave the harbor” and face the dangers associated with implementation and execution.Primary Care Essay Example
To overcome these challenges, an important tool in the innovator’s toolkit is the idea of rapidly testing ideas and evaluating the results toward an organization’s ultimate goal. The innovator can either make the decision to adopt this idea, adapt it based on learning’s, or abandon this idea and learn from what did not work.
As the first point of care for patients, primary care clinics and practitioners play a key role as a gateway to the rest of the health system, and they provide the basic preventive and curative care that saves the most lives. Recognizing that in many low- and middle-income countries, the poor rely on private providers for a large portion of their care, many experts and innovators are exploring market-based solutions to improve primary care. As a result, in recent years the number of primary care chains and franchises has grown. These models show great potential for impact, but chains and franchises continue to face numerous challenges related to quality, affordability, sustainability and scale.Primary Care Essay Example
Primary care leaders want and need practical know-how. They recognize that there are not always clear solutions to tough challenges, but they have found that there is value in sharing ideas and experiences, testing new approaches, and sharing the results to enable successful innovations to spread more rapidly between organizations and across geographies.
The following challenges in establishing and scaling primary care innovations, and the solutions to overcome them, are drawn from The Primary Care Innovator’s Handbook: Voices from Leaders in the Field. What ties many of these reflections together is a focus on family- and patient-eccentric care. Indeed, successful organizations have learned the value of listening to patients and ensuring that all processes revolve around the question: How can we best serve our patients and their families, based on what matters most to them?Primary Care Essay Example