Introduction
Home health care is a phrase used to refer to the intensive skilled care that is extended to patients in their individual homes. These services or form of care is unique in that the nurse or any other health care provider moves to the patients home temporarily and sometimes permanently until the patient gets well. Over the years, the home health care services have been emphasized on the elderly who are less mobile hence it is easier for the health care providers to move in the home.
The other important aspect of home health care is that it is paid through long term health care insurance or from the patient’s savings. This study on home health care will be conducted using qualitative research methods as they will provide the researcher with adequate understanding of the entire population’s perspective on the concept. Consequently, the non-numerical data which will be collected makes this method the best for this type of study.
Participants section
Despite the fact that the home health care has been dedicated to the elderly recently the entire population has developed an added interest of the concept. Hence the sample population will be picked across all age groups of the entire American population who can speak on their own accord to avoid any biasness. This means the ages of 10 years to 80 years. Similarly, qualitative research methods are quite specific due to their in-depth sessions hence smaller population samples are obtained. This will be 100 participants who will be picked out evenly from five states in the country.
50 of the participants will be in the process of receiving the home health care or those who have been through it at some point. The level of education will however be varying with more being out of school while the working class will take a higher percentage of the entire sample population. This is because the working population has to pay for their own hospital bills while their degree of maturity and exposure to various forms of health care is evident. Purposeful sampling will be employed extensively in demographics too by incorporating participants from the five states in equal proportions to prevent biases (Marshall and Rossman, 1998).
The research design
The research design of the study involves a preemptive approach to the topic question which will be used to develop the goal and scope of the research task. From the research question “providing quality and cost effective services to patients” to tackle this question, the various procedures developed must help the researcher get answers. Therefore, to obtain the non-numerical data for this qualitative research, the researcher has to gather information based on the cultural aspects of the sample population and their experiences regarding the concept as part of the phenomenological approach (Marshall, 1998).
Potential threats to validity
One potential threat to validity of the sample selection criteria is the applicability of the home health care concept to school going children more than 10 years but who are not conversant with the system. Similarly, the ability to justify the results obtained after the research question is answered. The proposed research may be failure to account for each step of the data analysis procedures as the researcher aims to generate theory from the figures. The failure in attaining sound conclusions after executing the formulated design by developing solid results which are necessary in the attainment of valid conclusion (Marshall, 1998).
Ways of minimizing the threats
The validity of information on the applicability of the topic on the age group that is less knowledgeable on the research is by carrying out extensive educative sessions with the that sample population. To minimize the threat of justification in results obtained by including in the recommendations future studies and ways of applying the collected data. The various data analysis steps are then explained in a more vivid manner hence reducing nay occurrence of a problem in the stepwise procedure. Consequently, the conclusions drawn from the results of the study are determined by the overall scope and design adopted by the study hence up beat following of the design reduces the threats identified for the research (Marshall, 1998).
Instrumentation
The research question for this research study is “providing quality and cost effective services to patients.” According to recent research, the quality of health care has been shown to be quite effective where home health care has been incorporated in the normal health care services. Consequently, the cost is quite effective as several expenses such as traveling and the side effects are minimized as the patient is under the close supervision of the health care provider.
In this case there for health care service is the independent variable as while its quality and cost are dependent on the on how they are offered to the patients. The quality of health care will be measured by the degree of patient recovery in home health care practice using hospitalized care as a control. The cost of home health care will be determined by comparing the cost of health care in the hospital and at home to evaluate the cost effective option (Marshall, 1998).
Constructs which will be used in the study include a self-efficacy instrument which will be used to determine the degree of efficiency in the health care service providers. This will be measured using a psychometric scale of 1-10 with 1 being the least measure and 10 the highest.
Procedures
Data collection methods
There will be two predominant data collection methods namely use of structured interviews and participant observation for those who are receiving the home health care.
Interview questions
The interviews will involve the following questions;
What do you understand by home health care?
Have you ever been through it or witnessed a close friend or relative going through the same?
Do you think it is worth all the time and cost?
Given a choice which health care mode would you like to see made compulsory?
Should home health care be extended for all in the entire population or to the elderly only?
What would you like added to home health care to make it more pronounced in the country?
Data collection procedures
The researcher will collect the data without engaging any second or third parties within a span of two months to allow for adequate time to travel to the five states. Before the data collection procedure is initiated, consent forms will have to be presented to the participants and their role read out to them. The debriefing process will be conducted during the presentation of the consent forms to reduce time wastage while data collection will be carried out immediately after. The student/research will be involved in the two months data collection procedure alone when the interviews and participant observations will be conducted.
Reference
Marshall, C. and Rossman, G. B. (1998). Designing Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
