Wait Time Analysis Assignment

Discuss the major reasons for long wait times in emergency rooms, hospitals, and walk-in clinics?

* Incompetency in organizing services: Inadequate coordination among those actively involved in hospitals - in overall delivery and planning of (health) services - which in turn leads to inefficiency in surgeries or other (health) services provided – possibly creating a bottleneck in those areas.

* Deficiencies in health care workers: Another possible reason could be the prolonged wait times patients experience, usually they don’t promptly see a doctor (a health worker to solve their issue at hand) which results in extending wait times in emergency rooms.

* Lack of collaboration from physicians; or teamwork as well as funding for further long-term and homecare: A doctor tends to work solo, or through an independent office. Individually dealing with procedures leading up to a surgery or (health) service can hamper subsequent steps in the (healthcare) process leading to delays and ineptness in handling the situation at hand. Furthermore the increase in preventable, and usually unnecessary, hospitalization due to cash-starved homecare coupled with residential long-term supervision has dramatically increased the pressure in ERs, i.e. prolonging wait times. Healthcare should always focus on need, and not pay (whether ability to pay; patients or willingness to receive pay; physicians).

* Overcrowding as a result of increase in ER patients: In the past decade or so, there has been an increase in ER patients (namely older, baby boomer generations). In most cases, as is the usual with most hospitals, ambulances are turned away due to overfilled ERs as hospitals/clinics face difficulties in locating the right specialists to tend to these emergency cases.

Based on your response to Question 1, describe two remedial measures that you would recommend to deal the problem of long waiting times in health care service sectors?

* Standardize waiting criterion and...