Blog #1

Enhanced Recovery: Improving Patients’ Surgical Experience

Patients are benefiting from this European approach to improve recovery after surgery.

 

According to the article, the U.S. can benefit from the European style of health care. In Europe their style of health care has an enhanced recovery system. This recovery system allows for patients to be discharged from hospitals sooner after surgery, and also have a smoother healing process. The U.S. is currently trying to replicate this program, which is called the Enhanced Recovery Pathways or ERP in Europe. According to the research done on this cause, the ERP is a very beneficial thriving system in the European system of health care. With this system, The hospital are able to have patients discharged a lot faster and lessen the patients hospital stay, and also allow for the patients to have a better outcome after their surgery. As an example they gave in the article, they said that the ERP program was able to lessen patients hospital stays to 4-5 days compared to 6-9 days and had a significant decline in readmissions. Also by reducing the hospital stays it was able to save the hospitals as much as $7,000 per patients and 700,000 in 6 months for patient’s lengthy days at the hospital. Overall the article stated that the U.S. would be better off with this kind of system.

After reading this article I also feel that the U.S. would be better off with this system of health care. It is shown in research that the ERP program has helped Europe’s health care significantly and in a positive way. The program was beneficial to the hospital as well as the patients. It also helped the economy of Europe by saving funds. If the U.S. was to adopt Europe’s style of health care it would benefit our society and economy as well. For example as it said in the article that it lessen the patients hospital stays, and readmissions, this would make the patients happy and also benefit the hospitals in since of status. If the hospitals have a good status then the more people would want to go to that particular hospital and would lead to an increase in funds for that hospital. Also it would benefit the patients in since of finance because the lesser amount of time they have to stay in the hospital or being readmitted the more money they would save. Overall I believe that the U.S, would benefit greatly from a program like Europe’s ERP.

http://health.usnews.com/health-news/patient-advice/articles/2015/02/04/enhanced-recovery-improving-patients-surgical-experience?int=98e708

Raven DeLoatch
2-5-15
8:13pm