Worldwide Patient Centered Care White Paper

Global Health Care Issues

The most significant healthcare issues that the countries surveyed are facing include care coordination and safety. Significantly, these issues were prevalent across international borders and throughout many of the countries surveyed. Care coordination in particular seems a salient issue, since it refers to the dissemination of conflicting information on the part of providers and an inability of patients to get further treatment because of a lack of prerequisites (such as authorization or tests) (Commonwealth, 2015). Such care coordination issues inherently lead to safety problems for geriatric patients. Other issues that were eminently revealed in this survey are that older patients have difficulty paying for the costs of their health care services. Subsequently, it is difficult for these patients (particularly in the United States) to obtain the care that they need. Other issues include a lack of ease with getting care the same day that a patient seeks it, without having to access extremely expensive (in the U.S., at least) emergency room facilities.

Comparing and contrasting the issues identified in this survey and their impact on the future of healthcare delivery in the U.S. yields considerable ramifications. Older adults in the U.S. are much more likely to be sicker than their counterparts overseas, and to have chronic conditions as well. Moreover, if the U.S. is to truly care about the health of its population, it must take active measures to reduce the cost of services in this country. Doing so will subsequently redress many of the issues that people have with getting care, simply because they will be able to afford the means to do so. It is worth noting that the financial woes discussed in this survey apply to older citizens receiving Medicare -- how much more so, then, do such pecuniary woes prevent the proper delivery of health care services to those who do not have Medicare?

The basis for the innovation and derivation of more efficacious healthcare delivery systems in other countries is based on a sincere desire to propagate wellness amongst those populations. Again, it greatly appears as though one of the key mechanisms that they utilize to engender such an effect is keeping the costs down for these services. In some of the countries that are referenced in this survey (such as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Holland, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the entire United Kingdom) healthcare systems are nationalized and…