Ways to monitor the performance of health care professionals

This article discusses the different methods to assess and measure the performance of health professionals or doctors in the healthcare settings. It covers regulatory inspection, surveys of consumer’s experience, third-party assessments, and statistical indicators. The article also mentions other key indicators of effective or poor performance such as professional development, colleague relations, and participation in practice goals.

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Medical
10/23/2018

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Ways to monitor the performance of health care professionals
Performance in any system, here healthcare is defined as the reflection of values in relation to
the explicit goals of the various stakeholders, such as patients, consumers, doctors,
professionals, insurers and regulators. Assessing and measuring the performance of health
professionals or doctors in the healthcare settings is essential along with the assessment of
patient’s health improvement. As the health professionals are responsible for the effective
delivery of health services leading to the patient safety and wellbeing, therefore they must be
assessed carefully for their profession (Kieft et al., 2014). There are five different types of
methods of assessing and measuring the performance of health professionals or hospital
performance.
 Regulatory inspection- In many countries there are some of the statutory inspectorates
to monitor the performance of the hospitals that means assessing the effectiveness of
doctors or health professionals. As some countries, have specialisations to implement
infection control and blood transfusions. These inspections standards have some of
the legal authority, which every hospital has to follow in order to ensure effectiveness
of their services. Licensing inspection is initiated in the countries like United States,
for the new hospitals, which ensures or confirms and measures the performance of the
hospitals or healthcare in terms of fulfilment of the minimal requirements for the
health and safety of the patients or consumers (Tsai et al., 2015).
 Surveys of consumer’s experience - Standardized surveys of the patients and their
family members in the hospitals are the reliable indicators of the performance
measurement of the doctors or health professionals in the healthcare. Through
surveys, it has been analysed that the hospitals or health professionals are focused
towards acquiring health education and patient empowerment, comfort, complaint
mechanisms and continuity of care and patients wellbeing. Advantages to use this
method is that from the patients survey and experience is that it becomes easy to
assess and monitor the healthcare performance, as they describe about the outcomes
of attaining health services (Fernandes et al., 2015).
 Third-party assessments – Some third-party assessments are the other tools utilised to
monitor the performance of health professionals, includes ISO 9000 standards, peer-
review, accreditation programmes measures the performance of the health
professionals and hospitals, in terms of the compliance with the published standards.

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ALPHA principles programmes are some other methods to assess quality of
healthcare, thus valuating performance of health professionals is used especially in the
healthcare of Europe (Plebani and Sciacovelli, 2017).
 Statistical indicators – The use of statistical indicators, suggest the issues of
performance evaluation and management of the health professionals in the healthcare. These
are the indicators, which assess the performance of the health professionals either internally
or externally, and represent accessible, and fairly economical & potential standard, and non-
invasive methods of evaluating performance. The raw data of the hospital is measured which
evaluates and identifies the factors of effective working of the doctors or nurses in the
hospitals and identify if there are any variations from the expected performance standards
(Kontopantelis et al., 2014).
Measuring a doctor or health professional performance is a complex activity, because they
work with other specialists, nurses and many other people in the healthcare. Therefore, there
are some of the other key indicators of their effective or poor performance such as
professional development of the health professionals, Colleague relations, participation of the
doctors in the practice goals and improvements, and engaging themselves in other
professional activities or programmes. Hence, these are some of the self-evaluation areas or
methods, also referred to as ‘internal assessment’, which facilitates assessing the performance
of the health professionals in the healthcare to monitor the impact affecting the health
outcomes (Busse, Aboneh and Tefera, 2014).
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References
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Doucette, D., Bannerman, H., Lo, J., Shukla, S. and Chan, W.W. (2015) Development of
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