Tag: Universal Health Coverage

Emergency department entrance.

Reflections on the United States Health Care System and the Right to Health

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Brianna da Silva Bhatia, Michele Heisler, and Christian De Vos

American health care too often fails to protect the right to health or promote health-related rights. Despite efforts to increase access to health care and to better incentivize high-quality, value-based care, the United States’ health care system remains fragmented, largely profit-based, and predominantly disease-focused rather than prevention-focused.

To design systems and policies that promote the right to health, a holistic and proactive approach is needed, one in which people, institutions, and corporations have a shared responsibility in promoting physical, mental, and social well-being. The Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (the Principles), allow us to imagine a new future and help outline a path for how to get there. In this piece, we discuss how the Principles might be applied in a rights-based approach to address some of the core problems in the U.S. health care system.

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Patient Safety Failings in Independent Acute Hospitals in England

John Tingle Leave a comment

By John Tingle

One thing that strikes the UK visitor to the USA is the vast array of  large public and private hospitals that exist with many having trauma and emergency rooms. Private hospitals don’t exist on this scale in the UK. Our major hospitals are public, state run NHS (National Health Service) hospitals. Independent, private acute hospitals are generally small in size, have no emergency rooms and maintain a bespoke health care provision. The focus is on patients with a single condition and routine elective surgery. The myriad number of complex multiple conditions, dementia etc that the NHS regularly face as a norm are not covered in the independent sector here with such cases being screened out. This limited focus on the type of care provided does mean that staff within independent acute hospitals have a sheltered and more controlled work remit and environment. This is a significant patient safety issue.

The Independent Health and Social Care Regulator of England, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) have recently published their findings of independent acute hospital inspections. They inspected and rated 206 independent acute hospitals and the majority were assessed as providing high quality care. At 2nd January 2018, 62% were rated as good,16 (8%) as outstanding. The report contains some very positive findings on health care provision in these hospitals but also some major governance and patient safety failings were found which are very concerning.

The Independent Newspaper reported back in 2015 reported that private hospitals ‘lack facilities to deal with emergencies’, and quoted a study that found that between 2010 and 2014, 800 patients, including those referred by the NHS, died unexpectedly in private hospitals. Read More