Reference no: EM133815472

Question

A hospital is seeking to reduce costs and enhance profitability. As the director of the respiratory therapy department, your responsibility is to implement cost-cutting measures within your unit. The hospital provides care for long-term acute care patients diagnosed with respiratory failure. Some of these patients are admitted while on ventilators, and the respiratory therapy department is tasked with weaning them off within two to three weeks. These patients are typically transferred from acute care hospitals, where it has been determined that they require additional time to be weaned off the ventilator, prompting their discharge to the LTAC facility. The hospital have a ventilator weaning protocol but most pulmonalgist are opting out using respiratory therapist driven ventilator weaning protocol. As a respiratory therapy director, how can you make sure that the protocol is followed even when physician may not agree? One of the bigest barrier for discharge is when a patient is on ventilator and dialysis as there are not enough facilities the patient can be discharges to. The hospital administrator is in charge of screening and accepting patients that financialy qualified to the hospital. If they don't admit ventilator patients the census will drop and the hospital will lose more.