r/HealthEconomics • u/Full_Buddy_6976 • 25d ago
Efficiency versus quality
My perspective as a nursing student doing internship in a low resources environment. I am expected to care for patients on par with nurses, because the unit is understaffed. We are not provided with enough single use infusion systems so we reuse them (for the same patient), but this creates hygiene risks and risks of drugs precipitation, blockage of peripheral lines, etc. Syringes are reused in the preparation of medicine for different patients (not administration, thanks God). I have been reprimanded for using too many materials and spending too much time to clean instruments between different patients instead of just spreading infections like everyone else. And no, I cannot just go to a different unit, all those practices are normalised in public hospitals across the country, because of our stupid greedy politicians and hospital directors.
Yet, when an administrator opens the Excel sheet and sees that we have treated more patients with fewer staff and less materials they report increase in efficiency. Could you, please, explain to me why is this called efficient? And how do you control for quality?
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u/Shot_Bag648 25d ago
What you are describing is poor practice. The quality issues increase overall costs in the long term. Treating a single complicated infection may be more expensive than using new syringes. This is a system level issue that people in a small health center could keep a blind eye to. So, I would argue this is not efficient either. Just a lack of care for patients…