Improving Individual Health Outcomes Across the Care Continuum

Revisit the scenario that you created for the Week Five Collaboration Café and respond to the following:

Expand your case scenario describing how the individual may experience transitions across the healthcare continuum as a result of the alteration in health experienced. (For example: the individual may be admitted through the Emergency Department, rushed to surgery, and transferred to the surgical intensive care unit; or the individual may transition from an assisted living facility to the hospital and then to a long-term acute care facility. These are just two examples; however, you can be creative as you expand your scenario.)
Discuss the physical, psychosocial, cultural, economic, educational, and environmental variables that may impact the individual’s health as a result of the transitions.
Explain how competency in holistic, advanced physical assessment, pathophysiology, and pharmacology can influence safe, person-centered care during the transition process.
Below is the Scenario
The patient under study is a 55-year-old male exhibiting the following signs and symptoms.

– Body fatigue and tenderness

– Fever

– Muscle redness and tenderness in the hands

– Joint pains are common in the morning when waking up

– Muscle stiffness

– The patient experienced the first joint pain two months ago, which increased to 3 other joints and has continued to suffer from the pain (Bullock et al., 2018).

Given the symptoms shown in the scenario above, this could result in cases such as Rheumatoid Arthritis. Rheumatoid Arthritis is an inflammatory disease that attacks the immune system resulting in painful joints and the inflammation of various parts of the body. This usually arises when autoantibodies start attacking various healthy cells, resulting in pain in joints and other parts of the body.

Rheumatoid Arthritis can result in adverse complications in the patient hence the need to manage the illnesses through a multidisciplinary approach. The management goals towards helping Rheumatoid Arthritis patients include:

– Identifying signs and symptoms from patients

– Managing patient pain and inflammation

– Improving the quality of healthcare

Inter-professional Collaboration Management

The disease can cause adverse health effects, including disability; hence this must be handled carefully. This will involve bringing together various healthcare workers to address the issues raised by the patient and boost patient outcomes. An assessment and evaluation will be conducted, and based on the findings, the healthcare workers can define an effective approach to adopt. Furthermore, working with pharmacists to identify the most effective medications and therapists to offer counseling services will immensely improve patient health (Shimmura & Tadaka, 2018).

Advanced Competencies and Inter-professional Collaborative Practice

Working closely with the healthcare professionals will help promote success and collaboration among the healthcare workers towards providing adequate health services. The strengths among the healthcare workers must be optimized, and weaknesses identified that need to be improved. The significant healthcare competencies include:

– Teamwork

– Effective communication

– Respecting assigned roles and responsibilities

– Good values and ethics in the workplace

The competencies will help ensure enhanced patient safety, improved workplace environment, improved outcomes, and mutual trust among the professionals.

References

Bullock, J., Rizvi, Syed A. A., Saleh, Ayman M., Ahmed, Sultan S., Do, Duc P., Ansari, Rais A., & Ahmed, J. (2018). Rheumatoid Arthritis: A Brief Overview of the Treatment. Medical Principles and Practice, 27(6), 501–507. https://doi.org/10.1159/000493390

Shimmura, K., & Tadaka, E. (2018). Development of an interprofessional collaboration competency scale for children with medical complexity. BMJ Open, 8(6), e019415. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2017-019415