Basma M. Saleh Ashmawy
The American University, Egypt
Title: Patient prioritization in different healthcare settings, towards better evidence based medicine
Biography
Biography: Basma M. Saleh Ashmawy
Abstract
Scarce resources put a great burden on health systems to manage to provide professional health services and infection control without being tremendously affected by the lack of resources and to manage to put evidence-based medicine into real practice and minimizing practice gaps as much as possible, especially at a time of scarce resources. One of the challenging practices is patient prioritization, which is the process of ranking patient referrals based on specific criteria and in specific ways to ensure equitable and efficient distribution of available resources, fair management of waiting lists, and the achievement of safer and higher-quality health care.
There are significant gaps in translating evidence into routine clinical practice and translating evidence into practice can improve outcomes, quality of life, productivity and healthcare costs.
Several studies have investigated different patient prioritization tools, which are used to rank patient referrals based on different criteria. First, a literature review was conducted to investigate patient prioritization process, and then thematic analysis of the chosen papers was done to come up with two points: the first is the general theme of the working environment that may affect the prioritization process, and the second is how different components and factors can be mixed to produce the decision to prioritize a patient over another.
These points are very important for decision makers and clinicians and need to be discussed in an open international platform to review different clinical experiences and to try to address the gaps and find solutions towards better evidence-based practice which could be implemented in different clinical settings.