Forms of Accountability in Health and Social Care Practice

In every situation, human beings have always developed the need to be taken care of or to caring for an individual. The tendency is cutting across the race of humanity whether the young or the adults, it manifests itself with the same vigor. Thus it is paramount to know what care entails in the exact term, and how does it relate to the nursing as a profession. In the context of lay- man, the term care exhibits the single provision of that which is necessary to safeguard the plight of an individual such as the welfare, health, and maintenance (Eyben, 2012). All these concisely confers care that elicits sort of protection to an individual. When the focus is shifted to the bearing of nursing-a platform that requires a lot of attention due to the nature of what it entails. Caring thus will be seen and described to fit the situation at hand under which can be referred to as any activity that people do to satisfy the needs of other individuals who are deemed unable to take care of themselves (Eyben, 2012). Moreover, the ones that are provided with care usually in this context have some illness or incapacitated in one way or the other, which calls for attention from the career giving the term an additional definition. In the context, it is thus summed that the care needed is concerned with the repair or providing support to maintain the physical, mental, as well as emotional health and well-being of other people.

In regards to accountability, the pressing question is how to combine care and responsibility in the health care platform to ensure that the objectives of the two are met concisely. Accountability is defined as the requirement of reporting and explaining the organizational performance, which involves scrutiny and regulation within the nursing circles. It is evident that accountability is the heart of patient care in the nursing platform and therefore competent practitioners are bound by codes and standards that regulate the profession (Eyben, 2012). The regulations typically make the individual practitioners to personally accountable for their actions and omissions in the case of dealing with the patients in an institutional setup. Some of the areas and forms of accountability fall into three categories such as

Personal accountability- under personal accountability, the focus is on the individual entrusted with the responsibility of an awareness of his/her competence together with the educational needs. The care is supposed to provide care to the people at the central point taking into consideration the educational ethics gained.

The team accountability-under the team, the focus is on the issues like delegation of duties and the skill of the staff to ensure the preparedness of the staff and the support in delivering the necessary care services that are assigned to the team.

The organizational accountability- under the corporate level, the focus is tied to the wider organization and the issues emanating from within. These include the policies, procedures, reporting and the kind of governance arrangements in place.

The above forms of accountability are deemed necessary in foreseeing delivery of safe and efficient care the people within the need because the individuals involved will in the end account from any act of omission and risk that may be the outcome. Besides, it is important to note that care is given based on the trust that the giver project towards the person in need.

Unacceptable care practices

Most of the unacceptable care practices are rampant within the organizations that are tasked with the responsibility of taking care of the old. Nonetheless, there has been researching to unearth reasons behind these unacceptable services. It is important to note that even at our homes, when we provide care to our incapacitated loved ones, often they will complain of negligence on the part of the caregiver. Thus, there are some pertinent reasons that result to these would be seen as an act of negligence the key reasons include lack of proper recruitment which anomalies the process. In such cases, the organizations fail to lay down the appropriate strategy to harvest the best candidates who are qualified to undertake the work of providing care to the persons in need (Eyben, 2012). Other cases that will result in the thriving unacceptable care are improper induction, inadequate training, and lack of support and supervision in the work place.

Other reasons that lead to unacceptable care include the total absence of guidelines and lack of professional standards and protocols. In one of the case studies, Marie comes out to be a worker who exhibits the adequate care. Marie is not only accountable for her practices but also exude quite some professional guidelines about her work. These include the codes of conduct, which guide her on what to undertake in particular situations (Roberts, Hsiao, Berman & Reich, 2003). When there is no proper protocol follow, the practitioners will swerve off the required mark, and thus the result actions will be unacceptable care given but do not meet the standards. For instance, in study case presented about a child protocol, if the practitioners in the course of his/her duty realize an abuse has occurred or is taking place or the child is at risk, then the staff should act by protecting the child in informing the statutory agencies soonest to avert the risk. In doing so, there is a follow of the protocol and failure to know what to do result in unacceptable care.

There exist an array of reasons why there could be a sprung up of unacceptable care within an organization. Firstly, when the care is not person centered, holistic and the whole process defies the sensitivity of culture. Within the working environment, the result of improper training will still act as a draw back to the person tasked with providing care to the individuals. Concerning poor training, it is apparent that the caregiver will be deficient of the required knowledge on how to meet the objectives of the task and subsequently the result of unacceptable care cropping up within the workplace. Additionally, the caregiver might not be aware f the culture of the client and may go against their norm, a move that will result in cultural prejudice. Sometimes, the existing number of personnel t handle the significant cases may present a big challenge when the staff is outnumbered by the client who needs the service (Eyben, 2012). The number performing a workload that exceeds what the available professional could handle may result in unacceptable care to the individuals in need of the service.

Contribution of evidence-based care to adequate care in health and social care practice

While analyzing some of the presented evidence-based care, it is quite clear that there is a lot of contribution injected to the health and social care with the guidelines followed to ensure that the care is given substantially to those who need it. For instance, evidence-based care help in making sure that right care is offered to the person in need. In the case of Christine, she is supposed to prefer and resort to the use of first guidelines since they are research based. However, they also contain case studies presented with several children and families who are experiencing bed- wetting and subsequently, the guidelines offer the most useful issues that the parents tried to incorporate thus resulting in a positive impact on the bad-wetting scenarios. The approach still helped Madison in stopping bed wetting as well as improving life for her in the future (Roberts et al., 2013). The use of evidence based by far conform in streamlining health and social care practice by considering health and safety in health and social care. At one instance, the health and security executive identified some sanitation and safety risks for the workers. These were slips and trips, which were caused by uneven floors and spilled liquids, musculoskeletal disorders and stress emanating from too much work and conflicting demands and more so the pay attention to activities that can cause strain or injury.

In regards to wastage reduction, the evidence based tend to contribute significantly less time wastage, quashing the unnecessary interventions as well as regarding the intelligent use of money. These are made possible because the research pertaining the question in context is presented and there is less need to carry out the case study repeatedly (Roberts et al., 2013). Researching many cases present, a lot of challenges and in almost all the evidence-based cases that are used tend to contribute significantly to the health and social care practice. The use of evidence-based cases presents ideas already analyzed ideas. The ideas can be challenged or tailored to fit an individual research schedule and in which the outcomes would show a significant tally with the social and health care provision.

The family care context

Overall, it is important to develop an understanding of attention and to discern which context do people become the caregiver. If one is presented with the task to do and it elicits a feeling from you that there is little to do or no choice but to take it on, it calls for remembrance that these are some of the situations that may convert an individual to be caregiver even without challenging the phenomenon. An evidence-based focusing on Ann notes that she promised her dying mother to be responsible for looking after her brother Angus (Roberts et al., 2013). In the original research, Ann reveals that there are other reasons that made her feel obliged to take up the role such as people expectation for her to do it and that they were living with him. In so doing, it is possible there are many people like Ann who does what they did not think of doing. Thus, it is possible that caring responsibilities can creep up on people while they are not entirely aware of the demands or what caring places on the individual.

Care in the family is one tasking undertaking that is often associated chores such as cooking, shopping for the people alongside getting the children ready for school. However, from the broad perspective, in the family context, there is dire need to focus on care given to the people with disabilities or those who need support because of illness or age. The interesting bit however in the case is that the caregiver definition differs and assumes the care spending significant proportion of their life to provide unpaid support to the family (Roberts et al., 2013). The caring could be done to relative, a friend, or anybody who is ill, disabled, or frail and or have a mental problem. Due to the family attachments, and he the fact that the service is offered by a relative, most people have had a lot of misconception thinking that the family member cannot be professional in care giving context. Another reason as to why it is hard to identify a caregiver within the household is due to the norm subscription which society does label on an individual. For instance, when her mother passed on, Ann became the caretaker to her sibling Angus (Roberts et al., 2013). The task of taking care of her sibling was to other people seen as something she is supposed to do thus she had the role ascribed to her even though that would not be her responsibility. Conventionally, Ann would not be qualified to fulfill the definition of the care. If she applied for financial help, she would be required to meet some rigorous criterion such as providing the care to someone for at least 35 hours in a week; she must be 16 years old and not a student and caring for the person formally recognized as having needs that call for care.

Reference

Eyben, R. (2012). The hegemony cracked: The power guide to getting care onto the development agenda. IDS Working Papers, 2012(411), 1-29.

Roberts, M., Hsiao, W., Berman, P....