Internal and External Analysis

Patient Population Characteristics

Weltee Wolo

Rasmussen College

Author Note

This paper is being submitted on October 16, 2017 Nichole Crais’s

Healthcare Management Capstone H490/HSA4922 course

The population selected here is that of patients receiving treatment in a health care facility. While the healthcare facility has more than 500-bed capacity, which means it is capable of hosting more than five hundred patients, the selected population is that of female wards which with a carrying capacity of 300. The number of females in these wards, however, is slightly above 200. As mentioned, the population describes female patients, and hence gender is already determined. However, the females are drawn from different ethnic communities, different cultural backgrounds, and have different health practices.

In the population, three major ethnic communities are represented: whites which accounts for more than 60 percent, African Americans accounting for about 12 percent; and Hispanics and the Asian Americans taking the remaining components of the population. Most of the women in the wards are senior citizens falling in the age bracket of 50- 65 years. Understandably, this composition of the population could be suffering from chronic illnesses which need constant and thorough medical care. However, the population is also composed of mid-aged women between the ages of 30-50. The smallest component of the female population is that of young women between the ages of 20- 30. There are no adolescents or children in the population.

Because of the disparities in age and ethnicity of the population, they have different health practices, especially when looking at it from the perspective of age (Murphy, 2015). The elderly in this cases are less active in taking charge of their health status, and hence have poor health choices compared to the middle-aged and the young women. The latter is more concerned about their health practices and hence spend less time sleeping, take occasional nature walks out of their hospital beds, and involve in some light exercises to speed up their recovery (Murphy, 2015). On the other hand, the senior women spend almost the entire day on their beds, which is characteristic of this population.

Being an expensive health care facility in the middle of town, it is safe to conclude that most of these women belong to the middle and high class regarding their socio-economic status (Burwell, 2015). Unless sponsored by insurance or through health care plans by their employers, these women are capable of living well without a lot of financial challenges. Additionally, apart from the elderly group, the rest of them are working-class women, probably with careers.

References.

Burwell, S. M. (2015). Setting value-based payment goals—HHS efforts to improve US health care. N Engl J Med, 372(10), 897-899.

Murphy, M. (2015). Unsettling care: Troubling transnational itineraries of care in feminist health practices. Social Studies of Science, 45(5), 717-737.