preview

The Organization For Economic Co Operation And Development ( Oecd ) Essay

Satisfactory Essays

Patients in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (including United States and Canada) continue to wait too long to receive medically necessary treatment. Waiting times’ situation not only have not been improved during years till 2015, but also they have gotten slightly worse (Barua, 2015 ). One of the main reasons for long waiting times is imbalance between demand and availability of scarce resources in healthcare organizations. Clinicians can’t treat all patients simultaneously. Due to high costs, managers can’t increase number of their limited resources as well. Then, patients’ access to these services should be prioritized in a way that best uses existence scarce resources. Absolutely prioritization is not the only option responding to limited resources in health care. There are other alternative like increasing efficiency or the overall amount spent for health care, and rationing by delay. But, rationing implicitly goes along with problems in principle (Nagel & Lauerer, 2016), and is not sufficiently narrowing the gap that occurs between demand and supply (Williams, et al., 2012). Rationing regularly refers to actual withholding of health services, while prioritization describes a systematic and comprehensive approach to analyze what is more and what is less important. It leads to a ranking order and make decisions (Meyer & Raspe, 2012). Prioritization in healthcare domain is preferable approach over implicit approaches like

Get Access