Individuals in Different Health Care Settings (week 2, post1)

Last week I got in contact with my mentor that our professor assigned to us on the first day of class and the experience went really well. We began our discussion by reviewing our backgrounds of one another. I went on to explain a short background of myself, where I grew up, my interests and so forth. My mentor started describing his career and the different opportunities that have presented themselves to him over his thirty year experience in the health care field. One of the things that stood out to me was the fact that he delivered health care for the navy and the setting was pre dominantly on a boat rather than a hospital. This was very intriguing to me because I've learned, for the most part, health care delivery in a hospital setting and I was curious on the similarities and differences compared to the navy. My mentor described how he was in charge of one hundred people on the naval boat, and how he moved up in the system to become the overseer of all those individuals. This made me think about all of the challenges that could come possibly come up, especially when the navy is in the middle of the ocean. When I presented the question to my mentor, he had a very interesting answer and he made it seem like it was the most important/frequent challenge that occurs in the delivery of naval health care. The problem he described was the difficulty of communicating with all of the different health care individuals when he was out at sea with the navy. This man knew how to deliver health care, but he obviously had to acquire the supplies from some health care professional on land in the United States. He described the difficulties of communicating with different health care individuals, and it revolved around the fact that he could never tell them an exact time on when he would be back to receive the goods based on the ever changing schedule of the navy. He went on to describe that having good relationships with these health care individuals was key to having a good delivery of care, especially when the navy has to cancel due to a schedule infraction. I was very intrigued that my mentor was involved in navel health care rather than traditional, hospital care because I learned all of the difficulties/problems associated with it. This made me think about communication between all kinds of health care settings and how crucial it is for individuals to have good relationships with one another. For example, a primary physician who administers a prescription medication to a patient must have a good relationship with the pharmacy in order to make sure that the drug is ready and on time. This comes down to effective relationships between the doctors, patients, and pharmaceutical workers in order for the quality of care to be as high as it could be. Ineffective communication between different health care individuals could really hurt people, whether it is a patient who wasn't given the correct care or a health care professional who makes a mistake prescribing a drug or diagnosing a sickness. These thoughts bring me back to my sophomore year when I took Health Management Systems because we learned how different health care settings communicate and transform information to one another through things like electronic health records. We went over people trying to breach the information and how these settings offer authentication protocols in order to keep the information safe, which keeps the relationships between everyone at a quality and healthy level. Overall my mentor did an excellent job describing his health care system and it really made me open my mind on how challenging it is for different health care systems to effectively communicate with one another.