Decision-Making in Health Care Importance of Sound Decision-Making in Health Care and the Potential Consequences of Poor or Uniformed Decision-Making
There are various reasons why sound decision-making is important in health care. Firstly, decisions in healthcare drive the actions and outcomes of the care provided. This means that sound decision-making in a leader is important as it ensures that the patient’s needs and preferences are met. Sound decision-making in health care is also important for health leaders as it enables them to assess and understand the risks associated with making poor decisions that can compromise the quality and safety of care and cause patient harm. Sound decision-making is also important as it opens the leaders to various options and enables them to select the most rational option. Additionally, sound decision-making is essential for determining the right patient treatment, including choosing medications for better patient outcomes (Manetti, 2019).
On the other hand, leaders’ door decision-making may lead to staff demotivation and risks compromising the quality of care services provided. Leaders making uninformed decisions may result in trial and error, a risk factor for poor performance, or a failure in the leadership to inspire motivated healthcare teams. Poor decisions may also compromise the ability of the leader to create an environment of collaboration, therefore, failure to tap into and utilize the potential of interprofessional collaborative teams. Therefore, poor and uninformed decisions can fail healthcare leadership.
Evidence-Based Decision-Making and Its Application and Importance in Health Care
Evidence-based decision-making (EBDM) is using current factual information and data as well as research-informed approaches to make decisions or choose between options in a given case or at a particular healthcare setting for a specific purpose or intention.
Healthcare practices depend on using available evidence to meet patient, community, and health demands. Evidence-based decision-making can be applied in health care using a few steps that analyze the capacity of the organization to support evidence-based decision-making. Effective application of EBDM in healthcare first identifies knowledge gaps within healthcare. The leader then converts the identified gaps into research questions that guide the identification of validated evidence. The leader then integrates the collected evidence in their decision-making process, making adequately informed decisions regarding patient care.
Evidence-based decision-making in healthcare integrates clinical expertise and current evidence to support leadership and care decisions. As new evidence is being developed in health care and creating a large database of information, EBDM provides an approach that enhances the ability of leaders and healthcare professionals to select the most suitable information and to efficiently translate new research evidence into patient care (Mazzucca et al., 2019). EBDM also plays an important role in health care as it ensures that healthcare providers adequately review developed treatment plans and other care actions before executing them, thereby reducing the instances of wrong care and errors in the treatment process.