Hospitalizations and patients’ experiences

Peter Pronovost, a renowned expert in clinical quality and safety, argues that it’s a mistake for hospitals to focus on patient satisfaction surveys and states that instead it would be more helpful to ask selected patients what proposals they would make in order to improve the hospitalization experience. For example, one of the people Johns Hopkins chose for this assignment was Podge Reed Jr., a double lung transplant patient who had amassed six hospitalizations, two surgical and four medical, eight anaesthesia outpatient procedures, more than one hundred visits to appointments and 700 laboratory tests. With this curriculum, the hospital felt that Mr.Reed should be a person with a clear opinion.

In the article, Jane Hill, Johns Hopkins’ Patient Relations Director, says that most hospitalised people, although appreciating the technical quality of services, also ask to be treated with kindness and care. Not surprising, given that being bedridden in a hospital is not a pleasant experience for anyone. As a result of patients' contributions, Jane Hill has developed a Decalogue that should be read as a basis for transforming hospitalization rooms, on one hand from the perspective of tasks, functions and competencies and on the other hand, with a view of patients’ experience.

Sleeping well, a determinant of health

There are some health determinants that we can’t do much about such as those that are marked by our genetic endowment, our family, the place where we have to live and the historical moment that is contemporary to us. Other factors, however, are linked to the lifestyle we decide to lead, such as sleeping well (in quantity and quality) a factor that doesn’t yet occupy a prominent place in the collective imagination. However, many studies aim towards common sense: if one sleeps well, the next day is better, and vice versa. That is why I was not surprised by the finding of a Finnish research that associates sleeping insufficient hours with drowsiness and life quality for adolescents or another collected from Harvard Health Publications that limited sleep to five hours a night for one group of students at the Singapore institute for a week and compared their abilities to another group who had slept for nine hours each night, with predictable results of cognitive impairment due to lack of sleep.

Value Based Medicine (VBM)

Evidence-based medicine (EBM), after 25 years, has generated substantial advances in research methodology and has made it possible to distinguish more clearly between good and bad treatments, to identify biases of any order and even evidence of conflicts of interest between research and industry. However, a group of English authors (The importance of values in EBM, Kelly MP 2016) believes that, despite the uncontested advances, EBM has put too much focus on the technical aspects and has forgotten that values ​​have a lot of influence at all stages of the evidence-building processes.

What do we mean when we talk about values?

Science strives to understand the world as it is, but conversely, values ​​are what humans reflect upon. Seen this way, the conflict is served and, therefore EBM should learn to navigate better between these two waters according to the authors of the article quoted below, "Values may act as heuristics – shortcuts in our thinking of which we are barely aware – which get us to quick answers to complicated problems. They form the lens through which we perceive and act on our world. Values are often tricky to pin down because they are such a pervasive part of things we take for granted. A necessary first step towards achieving this is to make our values as explicit as we can, so that we can reflect on them individually and deliberate on them collectively".

Do we need "bonsai" hospitals?

Joan Escarrabill

The ideal size of the hospital and the minimal activity (number of procedures) it has to do to ensure quality is a recurring debate. Sometimes the issue of the hospital size is related to the primary care’s ability to solve and, therefore, the possibility of closing acute beds (and redistributing the budget that was intended for its operation). In the 2009 EESRI edition, in Table 10 (page 21), there’s a very significant information: the number of acute beds per 1,000 inhabitants. According to this document, in Catalonia we have 2.4 beds per 1,000 inhabitants and in the whole of Spain 2.5. Only Turkey (2.3) and Finland (1.9) have fewer beds per 1,000 inhabitants than we do. Despite the data, there are people who insist on the convenience of closing acute beds if the primary care resolution capacity increases. It seems to me that there’s a better question: too many beds or too many hospitals?