For this Discussion Board, please complete the following: The healthcare world a

For this Discussion Board, please complete the following:
The healthcare world and the world overall is now a very different place since the COVID-19 global
pandemic uprooted people’s daily lives. Healthcare policy had to change on a dime in many places.
For example, hospitals fearing the worst limited the visitation of family members to those loved ones struck with illness (both COVID and non-COVID). New parents had to take turns seeing their
newborns. Telehealth has taken on a new leading role in many healthcare organizations because
face-to-face visits were no longer acceptable due to nationwide lockdowns. Many organizations
did this to mitigate risk and follow strategic national policy. Your organization has decided to take a stand to implement the same strategy. Its policy is to not allow any visitors during a lockdown.
In this debate, you are going to be placed on a side of the new visitation policy.
Your task is to argue for or against the new policy. You will argue against it.
You are tasked with presenting your case to the class on why or why not the policy should stand.
Cover the following:
Consider how this has changed the way that you view healthcare access and equality.
Consider the risk to the organization.
Consider the impact of the decision.
Should there be exceptions to the policy? Why or why not?
Use data and evidence from the literature to support your argument.
When COVID happened, healthcare policy had to change on a dime in many places. It turned everyone’s lives upside down and changed everyday life as we once knew it. It still affects us every day
in some way. Since I work at a hospital, I was a part of the policy implementation team and still play a solid role in our ever-changing visitation policy. This has changed the way that I see healthcare access and equality. When the pandemic started, the only people that came to the emergency department were those who had symptoms of COVID. Everyone else did not come to get the help they might have needed for fear of catching COVID. The same thing happened at health care clinics.
Like many others, our hospital stopped “elective” surgeries. This created a bad whirlwind for patients and providers. The patients were not getting those knee and hip replacements; they weren’t getting preventative services like mammograms, colonoscopies, and other outpatient-type surgeries. The delay in these procedures and check-ups created income loss for providers, created more pain and distress for patients awaiting these surgeries, and created diseases that might have been prevented with annual check-ups.
This is just one of many choices our organization had to make to protect our community, but it
came with many adverse outcomes. People were angry because they didn’t understand why the
policies existed. Fast forward to today, I believe that more people understand and have a better understanding of disease control. We do make more exceptions to the policy since the community
risk is lower than six months ago but we still have a visitation policy in place. Here is a link to our
current visitation policy:
https://www.dchsystem.com/covid-19/visitation-policy/