Differences between clinical quality and customer service quality in long term care

This article discusses the differences between clinical quality and customer service quality in long term care facilities. It explores the challenges faced in providing quality care and suggests ways to improve the overall quality of care.

Running head: HEATHCARE OPERATIONS AND QUALITY ASSESSMENT
HEALTHCARE OPERATIONS AND QUALITY ASSESSMENT
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Differences between clinical quality and customer service quality in the long
term care
In the present competitive market, where there are limited financial assistance, many of
the different well known approaches to improve the patient experiences require a large amount of
money mostly for the purpose of using technologies which are highly expensive. The
“customers” are generally people of good health who enjoy a high status in the society by virtue
of the potentiality to purchase different goods and services. On the other side, the patients are
those people who are not in their good health. Their status is quite reduced in the society because
of their illness and injuries that is renders them frightened, vulnerable, often in severe pain,
medications, exhaustions and often in confused (Myles et al., 2016). Normal customers do not
need to cross any barriers for the purpose of purchasing any goods whereas the patients have to
make several important decisions by crossing these limiting factors.
Recently the services in the hospitals have improved a lot in comparison to the last few
years, even the nursing homes are taking much better care to the seriously ill people (Sweeney,
Danaher & McColl-Kennedy, 2015). For example, many facilities have efficiently reduced the
unnecessary use of physical restraints and chemical restrains. Apart from all these improvements
serious problems are there regarding the quality of care. In recent studies, pain, malnutrition,
pressure sores and different urinary complexes are the more important complexes found in
hospitals and nursing homes.
Researching about the nursing home
The nursing home about which the discussion should be done is the nursing home
REGENCY CARE of Arlington. This hospital is located in USA. The full address of the hospital

2HEALTHCARE OPERATIONS AND QUALITY ASSESSMENT
is 1785 South Hayes Street, Arlington, VA, USA. This hospital has bed facility of 240 and this
nursing home is one of the proved leader in skilled nursing and rehabilitation. The flexible
interdisciplinary approach to the healthcare is centred on the compassion of the care givers. They
provide the care in a comfortable home like environments.
Researches are done on the complaints of the customers. So many complaints are there
from the customers. One of the customer complained that the hospital is very dirty, the staffs are
rude. Another complaint was found in which the customer wrote that no person should bring
their near and dear ones in this hospital. However not all customers reviewed it badly, one person
wrote that her husband received good treatment from the hospital. Another person said that all
the staffs behaved properly with her husband. One customer has complained that the
communication in between the clients and the management is not good.
Not only researches were done on the customer services, researches were also done on
the recent survey inspections. The detail analysis of the inspections show that the quality of the
hospital is very low and need to be improved recently. According to the results of the
inspections, the hospital fails to do the pre-admission screening, it fails to provide notifications
timely to the residents including transfer, discharge and rights to appeal, it fails to process foods
from the approved sources, it fails in distributing and serving foods according to the professional
standards. The nursing home also fails to implement gradual reduction of doses and different
interventions involving non-pharmacological things, it also fails to ensure the error rates of the
medicines that are prescribed to the patients. The most important complaint against this problem
is the control of the infection control and maintain of hygiene.
To improve the quality of customer care service in the nursing homes, different
techniques can be applied. It is very hard to consider the patients as customers but this should be

3HEALTHCARE OPERATIONS AND QUALITY ASSESSMENT
done (Monsen et al., 2015). The patients must get proper courtesy and respect otherwise. No one
should argue or contradict with the patients. If anyone disagree with them, they should be
informed about this very politely. The patients must be explained anything by using plain terms
and simple explanations. The patients must be kept in touch by the health professionals. They
must not be left out (Keller, Beck & Namasivayam, 2015).
The quality of the clinical care in the hospitals should be improved by following some
specific techniques. The treatments that are given must be much more effective (Guest et al.,
2015). The effectiveness of the particular approaches of treatments like the skin care and
integrity, management of behaviour and pain should be increased. The hospitals can use different
tools in improving the quality of the hospitals like Resident Assessment Indicators. The
approaches that consider the culture of care, chronic diseases should empower staffs who can
provide direct control to the care of the patients (Desebbe et al., 2016).

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