Scientific Research and Teaching Hospitals
While scientific investigations are essential to the running of all health-care institutions, teaching hospitals benefit the most from research as compared to non-academic medical institutes. The observation stems from the establishment of teaching hospitals to provide specialized operations, complex therapies, and lifesaving care. Unlike most non-teaching hospitals, academic health centers' services are not just meticulous but also sensitive, necessitating research to ensure that the body of medical knowledge, as well as practitioners' abilities, are in sync with the dynamism of caregiving environments and processes (Penington, 2008). The scientific inquiries provide an opportunity for not only producing new treatments, improving survival rates, superior outcomes, and shorter average length of hospital stay, but also keeping up with the aetipathological changes that characterize most diseases. Research work also ensures that teaching hospitals play a leading role in improving patients’ experiences and quality of services through designing and testing medical devices for exceptional primary, secondary, and tertiary services (Ayanian & Weissman, 2002).
Innovativeness in Handling Health Events
Another aspect that highlights the criticality of research in teaching hospital when compared with non-academic ones is the need for innovativeness in handling health events. Unlike the general practice settings in non-teaching hospitals, most academic medical centers offer urgent and critical care such as responding to traumas and burns, as well as remaining on standby to respond to unprecedented emergencies. Besides clinical competence and experience, such events also call for non-clinical skills such as timeliness and cost-effectiveness that can only be achieved through continuous research. For instance, while responding to disasters is of ultimate importance in promoting public health and safety net, the two need to be accomplished in a timely and cost-conscious approach. Such have informed health care financing research in teaching hospitals to promote economic optimality that is expected of all high-performance organizations. Roth (2006) highlight the punctiliousness of the resource subject in teaching hospitals, by noting that the institutions receive the highest number of uninsured health users, thus uncompensated hospital care. Handling the group calls for innovative solutions as the only cost-recovery platform is the highly unsustainable tax revenue.
References
Ayanian, J. & Weissman, J. (2002). Teaching Hospitals and Quality of Care: A Review of the Literature. Milbank Quarterly, 80(3), 569-593. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1468-0009.00023
Penington, D. G. (2008). Rediscovering university Leaching hospitals for Australia. Medical Journal of Australia, 189(6), 332.
Roth, P. (2006). Managing the Uninsured With a Community Network. The Annals Of Family Medicine, 4(suppl_1), S28-S31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1370/afm.560
