What are the Challenges Involved in Saving Lives in Hospitals?

The responsibility of saving lives that befalls our hospitals and the Indian healthcare system as a whole is thwarted by the several challenges it faces on all fronts. Together, these can affect not only the quality of care delivered but whether people seek that care at all.

Lack of Awareness

The first challenge to delivering effective healthcare is a lack of awareness in the public. From ignoring their symptoms and believing they don’t need treatment to more concrete barriers like affordability and a lack of resources, a lot of things get in the way of saving lives. This may be attributed to factors like poor education, poor functional literacy, and a low priority for health.

Lack of Access

Even those who are aware may not have access to quality healthcare owing to financial, organizational, social, and cultural barriers, even in places where they are available. This brings us to physical accessibility. Living further away from town increases the odds of disease, malnourishment, weakness, and premature death.

Shortage of Healthcare Workers

Not only do hospitals need to have an adequate number of working personnel, they need people who are appropriately trained and employable. By introducing simulation-led training in our medical and nursing curricula, we can create more prepared and capable healthcare workers in the future.

A 2019 study discovered that we only have one doctor for every 1457 people and 1.7 nurses for every 1000 people. And the manpower we do have is distributed unevenly as most prefer to work in more developed areas where their own quality of life and that of their children will be superior. The public healthcare system is also not allocated enough funds. This difference in quality of care drives people to prefer private healthcare, which is often not affordable for most. People in rural areas are discouraged and less likely to seek treatment when they travel far to government-run healthcare facilities and find a lack of qualified professionals and inadequate infrastructure.

Additionally, we only have one bed for every 2,239 people. These shortages in personnel, PPE kits, oxygen cylinders, and ambulances posed great challenges in saving lives during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Cost of Healthcare

The inconsistent costs and lack of cost regulation in the private sector often ends up as huge medical bills, specially in emergency cases. For example, because many families aren’t able to shoulder the increasingly high costs of infant care and pre-natal surgical procedures, the infant mortality rate in India is one of the highest in the world. In contrast, public healthcare facilities are cheap or free, but unreliable.

Poor Soft Skills

The ability to effectively communicate with the patients and their frustrated family members, and within the team itself is crucial to the success of a case more than you’d think. Theory alone will not prepare individuals for dealing with patients, so a good way to build communication skills and other soft skills is to incorporate simulation-led training.

Lack of Openness to Digitalization

Another challenge faced is the lack of openness to digitalization among the hospital staff. For several reasons, as the world becomes increasingly digitalized, hospitals need to catch up too. But not everyone may be comfortable with incorporating it to refine existing procedures. Doctors may also be set in their ways and show no interest in learning the new tools.

Less Emphasis on Preventive Care

Preventive care can usually solve a lot of problems in terms of misery and financial losses, and avoid worse problems along the road. But most people either don’t know or don’t care about general preventive care. This not only saves money for the patient, but also reduces the burden on the limited healthcare infrastructure.

As we advance technologically, with more facilities, there will always be newer challenges to address. What’s important is to keep going forward and create a reliable healthcare system for everyone.

More Blog:

Medical Simulation Training: Market Share, Projected Growth

Best Manikins and Simulators at the Lowest Prices by SEM Trainers

Getting the best of anything can be tough when you’re on a budget, you may have to make some compromises.

Whether you’re a hospital or medical training authority, if you’re out buying medical manikins and simulators, you don’t have to settle for all low-fidelity manikins or all the most basic versions. It is possible to get a combination of whatever fidelity, features, and simulators you need.

For now, let’s focus on our catalog of medical simulators.

Advanced Life Support Simulators

Advanced Life Support is a set of life-saving protocols and skills beyond basic life support, for providing help with circulation and airway management. We offer over 120 ALS simulators with the most lifelike features and responsive parts to facilitate superior ALS training. With so many options for adult, child, newborn, and debriefing manikins, you won’t have to look anywhere else!

Advanced Trauma Life Support Simulators

Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS) simulators help train students in management of acute trauma cases that need surgical emergency care. The goal is to maximize management in the golden hour (the first hour after trauma), and save a life. At SEM Trainers, we provide 55 state-of-the-art ATLS simulators. For instance, our Adam-X-ALS Human Patient Simulator is the most-realistic trauma support training simulator, yet it comes in 3 variants (levels 1, 2, and 3) so you get to choose whichever suits your training needs.

Airway Management Simulators

With 52 realistic, responsive adult and child airway management simulators, you’ll be able to teach students everything about the critical skill of maintaining or restoring someone’s breathing.

Basic Life Support Simulators

Whether it’s dealing with severe illness or a life-threatening injury, our Basic Life Support (BLS) manikins will make learners skillful in providing medical care until ALS arrives. Choose from AED trainers, adult, child, or newborn manikins, and BLS and CPR accessories.

Clinical Skills Trainers

In India, nearly 98,000 people die every year because of preventable medical mistakes. Our manikins and simulators for skills like auscultation, catheterization, laparoscopy, injections, and many more skills help ensure better learning so that mistakes aren’t made as often.

Emergency Rescue Simulators

Not only will these help students learn how to address an emergency situation and move the patient to a safe place, it will teach them to care for injuries and casualties. This includes everything from simulated wounds to artificial blood.

Gynecology Simulators

Bringing a new life into this world is a task like none other, so it’s important for medical professionals to be able to deal with any possible complication while managing to save both the mother and the baby. Our gynecology simulators include everything from life-size mother and baby simulators and breast trainers to cervixes and hysterectomy trainers to create another generation of increasingly capable gynecologists.

Obstetrics Simulators

Some skills just cannot be taught using only books. We offer 70 different trainers and simulators for excellent obstetrics training and teaching important skills like episiotomy and Leopold’s maneuvers along with different deliveries.

Nursing Skills and Patient Care Simulators

Through over 200 nursing skills simulators like adult patient care, geriatric patient care, pediatric patient care, neonatal patient care, ostomy care, decubitus care, and enema administration simulators, we help prepare confident, competent nurses to aid the quality of patient care.

Orthopedic Workshop Bones

Using biomechanical test blocks and artificial bones- both manufactured by 3B Scientific, a widely reputed brand, optimal training in orthopedics can be achieved. The foam blocks are perfect for testing bone density and simulating different characteristics like cortical thickness, and the artificial bones resemble genuine human bones in form and characteristics, simulating the hard outer cortical shell and the softer inner cancellous bone.

TCCC Training Manikins

Tactical Combat Casualty Care is one field where training is nearly impossible without simulators and manikins because of the inaccessibility of training on individuals injured in combat situations. Simulators like these with lifelike eviscerations, amputations, and gunshots wounds make TCCC training not only possible, but effective.

Patient Monitor Simulators

Real-time feedback is a big part of the effectiveness and success of simulation-led training. These patient monitor screens display vital signs, work with training scenarios, and provide hyper-realistic interfaces.

In addition to that, we provide several simulation kits, surgery simulators, human patient simulators, transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) simulators, virtual reality simulators, and virtual dissection tables. We deliver all of these premium simulators and manikins at the lowest prices.

With more than 600 affordable-yet-premium anatomy-training manikins, 1200 medical simulators, and many more in our inventory, you’ll be glad you came to us first!

For enquiries, you can call us on 02632 257259 or drop us a mail at sem@semtrainers.com