Gatekeeping Role of Primary Care


The Gatekeeping Role of Primary Care
Author’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
The Gatekeeping Role of Primary Care
Based on the authoritative volume, Delivering Healthcare In America, the gatekeeping role of primary care is a managed care initiative that was widely deployed in the United States a few decades ago. The initiative entailed physician gatekeepers collaborating with patients to establish their healthcare needs and select the services that will effectively suit them. Outstandingly, Shi and Singh (2014) affirm that the practice has dramatically declined in the US and is now considered as a failed managed care program. Chiefly, that could be because the supply of specialized medical resources in the United States is rich, accessible to all and limitless. However, in nations with scarce medical resources, gatekeeping systems for primary care are still emerging because of the number of pros that the system has. To begin with, the authors note that gatekeeping systems have helped in ensuring equity by prudently conforming healthcare services, including the department referrals, to the healthcare needs of a patient (Shi and Singh, 2014). Secondly, the gatekeeping system has proved to be very vital in altering the behavior of patients, by increasing contact with the primary care physicians hence reducing instances of patient’s self-referrals. Ultimately, a gatekeeping system for primary care has made countries, such as the United Kingdom, which deploy the initiative widely, to considerably cut on their healthcare expenditure (Shi and Singh, 2014).

More so, the gatekeepers of primary care have proved to be very reliable in acting as filters to the specialist care. Over time, it has been noted that patients who directly approach specialists are usually less likely to be sick, hence increasing the probabilities for therapeutic and diagnostic procedures to be applied unsuitably but with the gatekeeping systems in place, such scenarios have been averted.

References
Shi, L., & Singh, D. A. (2014). Delivering health care in America. Jones & Bartlett Learning.