How the Overall Hospital Experience Has Improved Over the Past Decade

Aren’t you glad you didn’t have to endure the hospital experience a century or two ago? Back in the day, anesthesia wasn’t exactly commonplace, even though surgeries and other painful procedures were. Thankfully, hospital care has come a long way since then. In the more recent past — even the last decade — hospitals have progressed in providing better care for patients. Here are some of the reasons to be grateful for the advances in medical care over the past ten years.

The growth of hospital systems provides highly coordinated care and locally tailored medical solutions. The past decade has witnessed the expansion of hospital systems. Now, instead of a single local hospital, a community is home to an entire network of hospitals linked under the same name. The growth of systems provides a superior form of care for most patients. A hospital system employs numerous specialists covering a variety of conditions, meaning that you can enjoy other physician expertise without the need for a referral. In addition, hospital systems usually have highly organized record keeping, and service that adapts to the specific needs of the local area.

Hospitals are using better diagnostic techniques and early intervention programs. A quality and efficiency analysis, conducted by the Commonwealth Fund, discovered that from 2001-2005, hospitals reported higher efficiency rates, and lower complication and morbidity rates. The report pointed to better diagnostic techniques and early intervention programs as the cause of the improvement. Any doctor will admit that early intervention of a condition is the single most effective thing that can be done to help patients. In addition, better diagnoses are directly tied to better hospital care. As these two aspects of hospital care improve, we can expect to see even greater improvements of the next few years.

Nurse training and expertise is improving. A hospital is only as successful as its nurses. Nurses are the ones who provide the daily care for patients, spending more time with them than doctors. The Center for Studying Health System Change observed, “nurses…influence the quality of care provided, and, ultimately, treatment and patient outcomes.” As nurse training has improved, so has the quality of care that nurses provide.

Patient safety has improved, due to the attention of the media and pressure by political leaders. In 1999, a report was issued from the Institute of Medicine that struck fear into the hearts of many patients and physicians. The report, titled “To Err is Human,” estimated that nearly 100,000 Americans meet an untimely end in hospitals due to simple preventable medial mistakes. In the aftershocks of the report, many hospitals rushed to improve conditions. The past ten years and beyond since the report’s publication has been a slow and steady improvement.

The healthcare scene is changing on a daily basis. From the power of politics to the advances of science, the status of medicine is never static. In the midst of the change the good news is that the trajectory is upward as hospital experiences improve.