Wait Time In Health Care: A Case Study

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Wait Time
Long wait times for patients to access health care services affects utilization of health care services (Oche, M., & Adamu, H, 2013). Long wait periods can cause stress on not only the patients, but also the doctors. For health care organization to deliver exceptional services, managing clinic wait time is essential. Wait time is included and a part in patient satisfaction is with care received. Failure to effectively manage clinic wait periods for services can lead to a patient’s dissatisfaction. Long wait periods are considered a barrier for patient to obtain services (Oche, M., & Adamu, H, 2013). Wait time periods are a tangible quality that patients use to judge health care organizations, even more so than the skill of the physicians
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Internal factors are controlled by the organization. Examples of internal factors include the organizations reputation, management structure, and its credibility. External factors are those that are beyond an organizations control. These can be things such as government regulations.
Prolonged wait periods can be caused by many reasons. Some of these reasons include inefficiencies in operations, care coordination issues, the design of the flow of the health care organization, the underuse or low inventory of available resources, and the imbalance of demand and supply of providers (Kaplan, 2015). Internal factors such as leadership and the organization’s culture can also contribute to the prolonged wait periods of a health care organization. Priority-based scheduling allocates earlier or longer wait times for patients according to the perceived need with different categories of patients and their conditions. (Kaplan, 2015). For example, in cases that seem to be less of an emergency and more routine are often put off or placed on later dates. Those sometimes this technique is needed when the demand for services is greater than supply available, this does cause some dissatisfaction for patients who are perceived as less