| Patient
advocacy groups: Need and opportunity in India
With an increasing number of corporate hospitals, healthcare related
issues, research trials and undue attention by media in India, there
is a need to focus more on patient’s rights and protection. In India,
multiple agencies like regulatory bodies, scientific review committees,
ethics committees, NGOs, etc. work toward patient rights and protection.
However, these agencies are inadequate to cater to the general issues
related to patient’s rights. There’s a need to have a separate group
of people who provide advocacy to the patient, or simply, a patient
advocacy group which will work explicitly in these areas to increase
transparency and credibility of healthcare system in India. This
group will provide special attention to patient care and protection
of rights from the planning stage rather than at the troubleshooting
stage.
Advocacy means “set of actions whose main objective
is to sensitize with a view to influencing decisions about a cause
or policy in a stated direction” and is done by “pleading or arguing
in favor of something”. In social advocacy, the people are the objects
of the stated good to arise from such actions. In patient advocacy,
patients are the objects of the stated good to arise from such actions.
Advocate is a person who does the act of pleading or arguing in
favor of something.
Patient advocate is a liaison between patients
and healthcare providers (HCPs) in order to improve or maintain
high quality of healthcare for the patients. The terms “patient
advocate” and “patient advocacy” have a broad range of usage and
may be applied to the actions of many different individuals and
organizations.
Source
Role of Patient Advocacy groups in India
Though we have governmental agencies and NGOs who are performing
many activities in healthcare sector, there is no single organization
in the country which will truly qualify as a PAG. Such groups can
further improve the overall quality of healthcare system in India
by supporting the patients in fighting for their rights, welfare
and safety with HCPs. PAGs can play an important role in improving
the quality of healthcare system in India by the following means.
Source
Barriers to Improving Patient Safety in
India
In low- and middle-income countries, adverse events may
develop from unsafe care in as many as 18.4% of patients, with 30%
of those events leading to the patient's death. This unsafe care
often manifests as therapeutic error, misdiagnosis, counterfeit
pharmaceuticals, or unsafe injection practices. Given this significant
burden, policymakers, public health officials, and researchers interested
in improving health outcomes in low- and middle-income countries
have increasingly focused on developing interventions to improve
patient safety.
While patient safety has been a major area of research
in industrialized nations for over a decade, data on the root causes
of unsafe care in low-income settings is sparse. For example, attitudes
and beliefs of healthcare providers about patient safety are important
to the success of safety-improvement interventions in the US and
Australia.(7,8,9) Patient safety culture, a term used to refer to
the behavior of health care providers relating to mitigating risk
of unsafe care, has been used in many industrialized settings to
assess a health system's capacity for improving safety.(10,11,12,13)
While some have studied providers’ attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors
about patient safety in low- and middle-income countries,(14,15,16)
most have been limited to the industrialized world.
Source
Patient safety is a fundamental principal of healthcare.
Medical care occurs in complex systems. The goal of a Health care
organization is to deliver safe, high quality health care to our
patients. Despite the
best intentions, however, a high rate of largely preventable adverse
events of medical errors occur that cause harm to the patients.
Adverse events also increase costs for additional treatment, claims
and litigation.
There is a need to have a culture that overtly encourages and supports
commitment to patient safety, open communication in a blame free
environment. We need to develop safety designs and reporting mechanisms
for any situation or circumstance that threatens, or potentially
threatens, the safety of patients or caregivers. The system should
be able to view the occurrence of errors and adverse events as opportunities
to make the health care system better.
Source
Patient safety is a serious global public health
issue. In recent years, countries have increasingly recognized the
importance of improving patient safety. In 2002, WHO Member States
agreed on a World
Health Assembly resolution on patient safety.
Estimates show that in developed countries as many
as one in 10 patients is harmed while receiving hospital care. In
developing countries, the probability of patients being harmed in
hospitals is higher than in industrialized nations. At any given
time, 1.4 million people worldwide suffer from infections acquired
in hospitals. The risk of health care-associated infection in some
developing countries is as much as 20 times higher than in developed
countries.
A nationwide comprehensive study (2002-2004) ‘Assessment
of Injection Practices in India’–by the India CLEN Program Evaluation
Network (IPEN) for Department of Family Welfare, Ministry of Health
& Family Welfare indicates that a very large number (3 to 6
billion) of injections are administered in India every
year. Nearly two-thirds of these injections are unsafe (62.9%).
Source
Interviews
We plan to do einterviews with MBBS doctors to understand 4 things
1) Tests or questions you ask in first few meetings
2) What it means in medical terms
3) What it means in non medical terms
4) What should the patient or care takers do
We might interview Aurvedic doctors, homeopathic doctors, Yoga teachers
on this health issue |
