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Patients may need to be delivered treatments like medication, lab tests, or physical therapy. We can consider it a delay when a patient does not get treatment in time. It also includes the delay in availing of an initial visit or follow-up appointment on time. A diagnostic error or correct diagnosis sometimes gets delayed due to failure in the ordering of lab work. It is a common issue in healthcare organizations. But the outcome of such a practice may prove to be fatal. All these create a problem when the patient is critical. An early diagnosis of heart disease can save the patient from death or permanent disability. All healthcare organizations should commit to avoiding treatment delays. One can apply the remedial measures only when the root causes stand identified.

Delay In Treatment
Communication issues

•      Lack of communication with the patient
•      No follow up from coordination office
•      Lack of communication between consultants

Contact issues

•      Lack of personal contact
•      Delays in the referral process
•      No response from the coordination office

System issues

•      Incomplete data
•      Inaccessible data
•      Network connectivity issue

  Availability issues

•      The consultant was busy
•      The consultant out of the town
•      Lack of consultants

Training 

•      Insufficient knowledge of equipment
•      Insufficient job duty training
•      Patient positioning & safety factors not applied

Scheduling

•      Inadequate system scheduling
•      Numerous scheduling conflicts
•      Not enough employees per shift

  Procedures for charting

•      Incomplete/ incorrect patient data
•      Not tracked properly

Job Execution 

•      Lack of routine machine maintenance
•      Lack of managerial oversight
•      Lack of standard operating procedure

This fishbone shares knowledge about some potential causes of delay in treatment. The fishbone consists of the parents and its child categories. It is a simple template that provides ideas on the factors hampering the timely delivery of healthcare services.

Who should use the Delay In Treatment template?

• This analysis is helpful to anyone who wants to find out the causes of delay in treatment. Assists the health workers who want to learn why a patient doesn’t receive treatment on time.

Why use this template?

• Understand the different factors driving delayed treatment.
• Review, alter and reuse this template using smartQED to solve the problem.
• Draft your templates for any type of problem analysis in smartQED.

Curated from community experience and public sources:

• https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Fishbone-analysis-of-reasons-for-delayed-physician-response-to-referrals_fig6_323032419