Angela Case Study

Angela Case Study

Introduction

As the principal law of medicine and ethics emphasize in giving patients the opportunity to access services and information, the clinical and the ethical grounds might vary in great deals. Moreover, even with the legal and ethical considerations in serving the patients, healthcare providers might fail to meet the patient’s needs and demands due to several reasons. In most cases, the law in conjunction with the professional and legal considerations affirms in meeting the expectation both professionally and ethically, cases from the Medical Protection Report defines incidences where the doctors might fail to meet the ethical expectations of a patient (Tourigny, Baba,  Monserrat & Lituchy, 2019). The goal of this essay is to further elaborate on why Angela case study can be justified based on clinical grounds and not ethical grounds.

First and foremost, Angela works in a busy community where the counsellors are not only understaffed but also minimal to meet the service expectations of the law of professionalism. Therefore, I think Angela’s failure to screen members of her group can be justified on clinical ground. As a counsellor, Angela is expected to design group to meet the needs of clients in the agency as well as ensure the candidates are screens. Being piled with other activities, it becomes very hand for her to make a follow-up other than ensuring the sent out colleagues will further assist in the operation.

Her inability to screen the members is furthermore justified as are no provisions needed for screening the potential members. Unavailability of provisions needed to carry out the task also comes in with a lack of writing resources that would help the potential members learn the goals and purpose of the groups. In the long run, the process comes out with further outcomes such as no information on the leaders’ background or the techniques the participants might need.

Generally, if counsellors are understaffed and that there is high patient to counsellor ratio, it means that the patients are more likely to receive poor services such as lack of information and accessibility. In cases where counsellors are working in a busy community, and they are few, chances are they are more likely to have burnout or experience emotional exhaustion (summer, 2017). In the long run, for every extra patient allocated to them, they might end up delivering poor services as expected. Severally, such kind of community-based healthcare might experience medical errors and high rates of patient fall among others.

The ethical perspective of healthcare service provision denotes that every patient should have access to services provided regardless of the time they were in the venue. However, with Angela’s case, it becomes so difficult to fit such expectation, including room for gathering information or accessing the services. Based on the clinical ground with understaffed issues, Angela would run away for other service provision like missed treatments for other patients like screening. Community-based healthcare with understaffed issues tends to several side effects to the patients as well as healthcare. In primary evidence-based back in 2018 by Needleman, understaffing has side effects, especially when the patient demand is high and there is employee shortage. Missed treatments are often associated with understaffing, and that information reaching out to the potential customers might be limited.

On the other hand, I think there are other potential problems that one would see in the way Angela formed her group. To be with the total number of people present in the focus group like admitting 1o people in such a busy and understaffed community-based counselling area was a problem. In the end, due to many activities taking place, she ended up failing to screen the patients the receptionist had enrolled (Miller, 2020). Also, maintaining a relationship with patients admitted tend to be a problem. That is why none of them was aware of the leader’s background, no better way of handling them irrespective of their problems as well as lack of possible information on the techniques that might be used in the screening.

Besides that, another potential problem one would tell after analysing the total number of people present in Angela’s group is the ethical challenges intertwined to poor services. Malasia Code of Ethics denotes that patients are provided with any available information regarding the services, opportunities, techniques or even nature of the activity taking place (Metcalf, Wang & Habermann, 2018). Because it is essential to ensure the select groups meets the ethical law of regulation. In most cases, high patient ratio to that of a counsellor has more profound consequences due to workload. Furthermore, as the population is ageing, an understaffed healthcare system regardless of the services provided has an impact on the safety of the patient. Safety in the type of information received, the services provided as well as the duration in time they stay in the hospital.

In summary, it is crucial to consider the type of workload in relation to the total number of counsellors present in busy community healthcare. This is important as it affects the type of information and services the patient received. It is generally essential to note the impact understaffed healthcare venue has to the overall performance of the patient.

References

Metcalf, A. Y., Wang, Y., & Habermann, M. (2018). Hospital unit understaffing and missed treatments: primary evidence. Management Decision.

Miller, B. (2020). Weekend warriors: Managing an understaffed workforce in a crisis.

Tourigny, L., Baba, V. V., Monserrat, S. I., & Lituchy, T. R. (2019). Burnout and absence among hospital nurses: an empirical study of the role of context in Argentina. European Journal of International Management, 13(2), 198-223.

Summer, M. (2017). A qualitative inquiry of psychologists’ experiences in college counselling: implications for staff turnover and retention (Doctoral dissertation, Rutgers University-Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology).