Health care is the management of the public health to make sure that the illnesses are prevented, treated and controlled in a manner that the public does not suffer. This has to be done by health professionals. Maintaining the good health entails a lot, it does not mean just treating, preventing and controlling as simple as it may sound. It involves making sure that the food available to the public is safe, any occurrence of diseases that pose great threats are controlled, the facilities offered to the public should be of good standard and so many other duties.
Successful management, requires a country to make sure she has the relevant systems needed for health care management (Barker 1996, p. 15). It is not only the government or state that is responsible for the safety of the public considering provision of health care services, the private sector is also involved, but most of this group provide services to the rich or middle class.
Most state health concerns provide services to everyone regardless of the class/standard of living or the much one has got in terms of money. Other areas of importance that have to be considered in health care is the how medical care is organised, the finances and the delivery system. Just these are the core issues to be dealt with in, health care anywhere. There are other things though that have also to be in mind when you talk of health care, such are the systems or programs of the health care.
Health care system or program refers to the organised way in which a country or a health institution would deal with prevention of health problems, treatment, delivery of health services and so many other health requirements that have to be attended to, to ensure public safety and satisfaction regarding health. After all what do people live in the world for? Good health, seconded by wealth. One looks for wealth only when he is fine health wise.
Some of the programs include; TB control, HIV mother to child transmission prevention, Malaria control in Africa, programs of blood donation, infant health, family planning, maternal health and others (Brent 2003, p. 75). Knowing what health care is, who is responsible for the maintenance and for what purpose it is maintained, how can all these be accomplished? For a program to be set up, it has to have a target to work towards or a mission to accomplish. The main one being, good services hence good/quality health.
Though they are so many, each program is dealt with solely. A report on how the program is fairing on and the accomplishments need to be in place therefore evaluation is the answer to this. Evaluation: This is the processes used to determine the value, the quality or if set targets have been met by the government , institutions, something or even someone using standards. It can be done on both profit making and non-profit making organizations and enterprise such as health care, the government, criminal justice, businesses and the list goes on.
Just as noted before, there are evaluation standards that the experts or the evaluation bodies have to use to guide them in finding out what they are looking for. These standards too are dependent on the program, which means various standards are set for different purposes for example the standard operating procedures, the standard quality services, the standard quality of goods and others. This does not mean that those evaluation done to establish accomplishments are out of place, it is just that in evaluation too there are different types.
Based on this, when an evaluator has to do his work, he/ she has to consider the approach to which he/ she will use for the work assigned. This is just the way an evaluator would plan on under taking the role of coming up with a report of evaluation, so he has to think of the design to use, the project/ program to be evaluated generally and lastly how to conduct the evaluation (Fink, A. 2004 pp. 120-128). Various approaches have been identified but there is one an evaluator can think of and make use of, which is the approach based on liberty, democracy and ideology.
An evaluator has the choice to think of his own strategy to get the right thing done, putting into consideration several factors like the ethical considerations and the values. There are various types of evaluation methods too that have to be considered, but again the main issue is the qualitative and the quantitative methods of evaluation. Evaluation has its importance both to the public contributing to the economic development and to the contractees of the evaluators for various reasons.
Evaluation therefore have various roles which include; to ensure quality service provision, to serve as proof to various institutions and governments keen on their resources that some work is done properly and according to plan, to assure profit making and non-profit making enterprises with set targets that there missions are accomplished or not and to give confidence to an enterprise that a program is running according to the plan set for it in the right direction. An organization’s decision to do evaluation therefore is for improvement generally and good maintenance so that there is no big loss and missions are accomplished (Rossi et al.2003, pp 234-238).
Health care evaluation is therefore the determination of whether health targets are met, the service delivery standards and the value of health care generally. Since health care constitutes so many programs, evaluation is dependent on the program and the reason for evaluation. Health care systems do not have programs alone though, there are other areas of concern that evaluation can be done, but mostly it is the programs. In this discussion, since health care deals with programs, a selected program of choice will be evaluated. It is important therefore to look at the requirements of program evaluation.