1. Understand the policy context of healthcare services
1.1 Legislation, policy and guidelines impacting on healthcare delivery
Legislation and policies plays a significant role in terms of better healthcare delivery. It act as a guidelines for the healthcare organizations and professionals to cater best services to the patient in terms of quality, safety and affordability standards. The legislation is as under:
Care Act 2014: Care Act 2014 is legislation concerning to the care and support for adults and wellbeing of the carers. The Act ensures that people receive care according to the requirements or care need and prevent it in becoming more serious. The legal framework provide clear guideline for local authorities and other parts of local health and care system concerning the protection of adults at risk of abuse or neglect. The legislation consist guidelines for healthcare professionals and staff regarding furnishing effective care to the adults, disabled people and so more result in better healthcare delivery (Doren, Park and Olson, 2023). The care act based on the six principles including empowerment means to furnishing freedom as well as power to the adults to make decisions for their own. According to this, during furnishing care, autonomy given to patient to take own health decisions, leads to quality of care and better patient outcome (Care Act 2014, 2025). In addition, the act allows in providing protection to the patient in terms of negligence while providing care. The legislation also hold the healthcare service provider accountable and responsible for their actions hence in better healthcare delivery in context of quality, safe and accessible care.
Health and Social Care Act 2008: Another legislation for the better healthcare delivery is Health and Social Care Act 2008, it is an act of Parliament of United Kingdom. The regulation emphasizes on restricting the individual or patient from receiving the unsafe treatment and care as well as allows in prevent harm. Referring to the legislation, the healthcare organization requires evaluating the risk regarding the health and safety of the individual during the procedure of the treatment and care (Ocloo et al, 2021). In addition, the legislation ensures the standards of qualification, experience, competence and skills for the healthcare staff for the purpose of furnishing quality services. The act also furnish guidelines for organization concerning premises and safe use of equipments and sufficient availability of the necessary medicine, medical tools, equipments and other supplies to ensure timely and quality care to the patient (Health and Social Care Act 2008, 2025). In addition, it also concern with maintaining safety of the patient via proper cleanliness guidelines for the purpose of prevent infection. Thus, the legislation plays a crucial role in furnishing better healthcare delivery in terms of quality care, better access to care and satisfactory patient outcome.
1.2 Impacts of key requirements on services
The legislation such as Care Act 2014 and Health and Social Care Act 2008 have a significant impact on the services and delivery of the healthcare. It is as under:
Personalized care: The legislations significantly impacts on providing personalized care to the patients as it includes considering the needs and requirements of patient while delivering the healthcare services. For instance, referring to the Care Act, to provide care to the adults, care plan prepared after evaluating the demand, needs and earlier medication of the concerned people, result in provide personalized care. Apart from this, in context of Health and Social Care, the healthcare professionals focus on providing autonomy to the patient to make decisions in regards to their health, leads to allow in furnish healthcare services in personalized manner.
Quality of care and services: Another important impact of the healthcare legislation is quality of care or services as it set standards for healthcare providers to cater care services. The Care Act provide guidelines for prevention of negligence while delivering care services, hence significantly help on provide quality care services (Llewellyn et al, 2023). On the other hand, Health and Social care Act provides guidelines such as safety and cleanliness within the healthcare premises, result in ensuring the safety of patient from the infection, result in providing quality of care to the patient.
Better patient outcome: The guidelines and standards of the healthcare legislation significantly impacts the care services correspondingly result in effective and efficient patient outcome. For instance, the Care Act shifted the emphasize of “furnishing service” to “meeting requirements” as the guidelines of the law include respecting the identity, preference and will of the individual (Stirton, 2023). Thus, the healthcare professional considers needs before providing treatment to patient, result in a satisfactory patient outcome.
Access to care: The legislations makes the healthcare services accessible to everyone including adults, disabled one, lower income group and so more. The both laws ensures that each individual get access to care services in an effective and proficient manner regardless of the health status or income level.
2. Understand the requirements necessary for working as a healthcare professional
2.1 Two requirements significant for healthcare professionals
Healthcare professionals refers to the individual that furnish preventive and curative health care services to the individual and community in an organize manner. Working as a healthcare professional it is important to compliance with the several requirements in terms of values, skills, attitudes, ethics and knowledge.
Values: It refers to the beliefs regarding right and wrong that control individual behavior. In the context of healthcare professional, values plays an important role in perform the role in proficient manner. The two important values for the healthcare professional include integrity and human dignity.
- Integrity: Integrity defined as a value of doing work with honesty without doing any kind of discrimination within the patient.
- Human Dignity: Human dignity refers to respecting dignity of patient by treating them with the kindness and thoughtfulness. The values allow the professional to furnish quality and ethical care to patient while avoiding unethical practices that harm patient (Combrinck, Van Wyk and Mogale, 2022).
Attitudes: It refers to the way in which individual feel, think and behave. Healthcare professionals should have a positive as well as an altruism attitude to provide better services.
- Positive Attitude: A positive attitude is an important requirement for the professional to get positive outcome of the services. A professional with positive attitude able to motivate the patient in the positive way result in lack of resistance in terms of medication.
- Altruism: It refers to a behavior of caring about the requirement and happiness of the other people rather than own. Being a healthcare professional, it is main requirement to have a selfless attitude to work as it is good for the patient as well as professional.
Skills: It means an ability to use own knowledge to perform the job role in effective manner. In the context of healthcare professionals, having an effective skill crucial for better delivery of healthcare services. Two skills requirement are:
- Communication skill: It is important skill for conveying information and message. The healthcare professional requires skill to communicate with the patient while using verbal and non-verbal cues for better understanding. The skill plays an important role in understand symptoms and disease suffered by the patient and communicate with proper medication (Tamaliūnaitė et al, 2022). In addition, the skill requires communicating with superiors, fellow members to discuss health condition.
- Decision-making: It is important required skill for the professionals to take timely decision by identifying pros & cons and health condition of individual. It allows profession to perform best in emergency situation and protect life of patient from danger.
Knowledge: It refers to an awareness of facts and practical skills.
- Working laws: The professional should have a knowledge of different laws while working within the industry such as patient confidentiality, Care Act and so more. This allows in perform the role in best manner without any risk.
- Work ethic: Another important requirement for the healthcare professional is having a good knowledge of work ethic in regards to accountability, integrity, professionalism, empathy and so more for better healthcare service delivery.
Ethics: It is a moral principles that furnish ideas about the right and wrong. The two important ethics requirement for the healthcare professional are:
- Fairness: Professional should perform duties in fair manner by treating everyone with care, respect, equality without any discrimination (Desai and Kapadia, 2022).
- Confidentiality: One of ethic for professionals is maintaining confidentiality of personal and sensitive information of the patient.
The requirement of value such as integrity and human dignity have a merit of better patient health outcome as well as in terms of professionals advantage having high self-esteem and confidence. Good values result in good reputation of professional and satisfaction among the customer. In addition, merits of positive and altruism attitude includes dealing with serious health issues and patient in ease manner while furnishing compassionate and patient centered care that enhance treatment outcome and satisfaction level of patient.
Moreover, communication and decision-making skill have an advantage of better career opportunities, creation of better patient-doctor relation, solving emergency cases and so more. On the other hand, efficient performance, great patient satisfaction and outcome, gaining patient trust, creation of better image and honest working is some of the merits of ethics in healthcare profession (Liu et al, 2021). Also, effective implementation of care practices, fair practices and effective overall health outcome is some of merits of knowledge requirement.
Thus, for working as a healthcare professional it is identified that values and ethics plays a crucial and important role in performing the professional role in honest, ethical manner without having any kind off biases between patients or associated staff at the workplace. On the other hand, it is identified that only having values and positive attitude is not enough in healthcare sector, it is important to have a set of skills like communication, decision making and knowledge regarding the healthcare laws and ethical working. However, maintaining ethical practices also crucial for healthcare professionals to survive from breaking of code of conduct such as confidentiality.
2.2 Significance of reflective practice for healthcare professionals
Reflective practice refers to an action of learning from own experience towards attaining the new insight of self as well as practice. In other words, it is a systematic review process that allows the individual to link own past experience to the next, to ensure individual get maximum progress (Patel and Metersky, 2022). In the healthcare industry, reflective practice plays an important role for the healthcare professionals to learn and enhance professional practice on continuous basis to ultimately improve the wellbeing of communities and society. The reflective practice allows the practitioner to attain the valuable self-awareness by giving them opportunities to recognize own strengths and weaknesses. Identification of the areas of development allows the practitioner to focus on taking corrective actions foe enhancement of the same. For instance, if the practitioner find that their communication skill are not effective to deal with the different kind of the patients, then the practitioner will emphasize on developing the weak area by attaining the different seminars, result in enhancement of the skill that aids in maintain rapport and build relation with the patients.
In addition, the reflective practice result in encourage engagement, with the help of this practitioner able to develop an understanding regarding the different several viewpoints and perspectives. This leads to enable the practitioner to learn about new things that is crucial for improve the delivery of the care services result in better patient outcome (Thompson and Thompson, 2023). In addition, the reflective practices allows the practitioner to develop new knowledge and skills within a set timeframe by preparing a personal development plan that efficiently defined the required action, resources, tool foe measurement and set timeframe. It leads to result in development of enhancement area in rapid and timely manner without affecting the other work.
Besides this, within healthcare sector, medicine is changes continuously, new challenges rise as well as introduction of new treatments as well as breakthrough happens each year. Therefore, it is crucial for the healthcare professionals to learn and grow constantly. The reflective practices plays an important role in this area as it instills a habit of self-evaluation and critical-thinking, leads to promote a lifelong commitment towards learning as well as staying knowledgeable with the advancements. This result in enhancing healthcare professional delivery services, crucial skills that result in improve overall healthcare outcome and health condition of people in a significant manner.
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Refrenecs
Books and Journals
Combrinck, Y., Van Wyk, N.C. and Mogale, R.S., 2022. Preserving nurses’ professional dignity: Six evidence‐based strategies. International Nursing Review, 69(1), pp.106-113.
Desai, M.K. and Kapadia, J.D., 2022. Medical professionalism and ethics. Journal of Pharmacology and Pharmacotherapeutics, 13(2), pp.113-118.
Doren, E.L., Park, K. and Olson, J., 2023. Racial disparities in post-mastectomy breast reconstruction following implementation of the Affordable Care Act: A systematic review using a minority health and disparities research framework. The American Journal of Surgery, 226(1), pp.37-47.
Liu, S., Li, G., Liu, N. and Hongwei, W., 2021. The impact of patient satisfaction on patient loyalty with the mediating effect of patient trust. INQUIRY: The Journal of Health Care Organization, Provision, and Financing, 58, p.00469580211007221.
Llewellyn, M., Verity, F., Wallace, S., Calder, G., Garthwaite, T., Lyttleton-Smith, J. and Read, S., 2023. From act to impact? Final report of the Evaluation of the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014.
Ocloo, J., Garfield, S., Franklin, B.D. and Dawson, S., 2021. Exploring the theory, barriers and enablers for patient and public involvement across health, social care and patient safety: a systematic review of reviews. Health research policy and systems, 19, pp.1-21.
Patel, K.M. and Metersky, K., 2022. Reflective practice in nursing: A concept analysis. International Journal of Nursing Knowledge, 33(3), pp.180-187.
Stirton, R., 2023. Hospital food standards in section 173 of the Health and Care Act 2022: political magic with a soggy bottom. N. Ir. Legal Q., 74, p.689.
Tamaliūnaitė, A., Kulikovaitė, G., Zabulienė, L. and Utkus, A., 2022. BENEFITS OF COMMUNICATION SKILLS AND COMMUNICATION SKILLS TRAINING OF HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONALS. SVEIKATOS, 32(2), p.162.
Thompson, S. and Thompson, N., 2023. The critically reflective practitioner. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Online
Care Act 2014. 2025. Online. Available through: < https://cpdonline.co.uk/knowledge-base/care/care-act-2014-principles>
Health and Social Care Act 2008. 2025. Online. Available through: < https://www.cqc.org.uk/guidance-providers/regulations/regulation-12-safe-care-treatment >
