Task Shifting – A management strategy of Health Care organizations in developing countries
The acute shortage of professionally qualified healthcare workers in developing countries is creating big problem in providing quality and timely health services to the needy people. Despite of many trained health care professionals our health care system is struggling to provide optimum services to the patients. This shortage is compounded by a high burden of infectious diseases, emigration of trained professionals, difficult working conditions, and low motivation by country governments. Even though, the permanent solution to this problem is to create more professional doctors by increasing training courses, training facilities through modifying government policies and enhancing resources to do so. But such actions and resultant solutions take long time to realize in practice. Hence a quick optimum solution is needed to address the critical shortage of trained healthcare professionals. Out of many alternatives, the best alternative for health care executives in any hospital of primary health centres is the strategic decision of thinking and implementing so called strategy of task-shifting. Task-shifting is a management strategy in which the clinical care responsibilities are transferred from more specialized professionals to less specialized health workers through proper delegation. This delegation of tasks from one cadre to another, previously often called substitution, is not a new concept. It has been used in many countries and for many decades, either as requirements to emergency needs or as a method to provide adequate healthcare service at primary and secondary levels, especially in rural and urban health centres with understaffed facilities, and also to enhance quality and reduce costs. In this paper we have studied the quality and satisfaction of patient counselling through empirical study. The data collected from 228 subjects reveals that only 7.01% of the subjects have received counselling always, 59.65% think that counselling should be given and only 41.66% are satisfied with current health care ...