Quiz 7: Responding to health risks

Please choose the one, most correct answer to each question or statement.

What is primary prevention?
- Preventing infections in primary school children
- Identifying and removing risk factors before they cause harm
- Providing primary care to a community
- Preventing the commonest cause of death in a population
What is secondary prevention?
- Preventing sport injuries in boys attending high school
- Preventing the spread of primary cancers to other parts of the body
- Identifying and treating a condition early to return the person to full health and often cure the patient
- Preventing the second most common cause of death in a community
What is tertiary prevention?
- Makes sure that a person with an established health problem can function as fully as possible
- The most effective form of preventing a medical condition
- Preventing health problems in students at a university health clinic
- Curing a condition when the first and second line of treatment has failed
What is a common problem with primary prevention?
- It is usually very expensive
- If often is not effective
- Consent has to be obtained from parents
- It has to be applied to many to benefit only a few
What is an important drawback of screening for disease?
- It is easier to diagnose a disease when it first presents with symptoms and signs
- It is usually cheaper to treat established disease than pay for a screening programme
- There is an emotional cost when someone is diagnosed through screening while they still feel perfectly healthy
- It would be better if health workers looked after sick people than screen well people
What is essential for a good screening programme?
- There must be an effective treatment for the condition being screened for
- It should be an uncommon and not very serious disease
- Price is not important if it is a good test
- People should be able to do the test themselves
What is one of the criteria for a good screening test?
- Everybody it identifies must have the disease
- It should be very cheap
- It should be particularly sensitive in children and younger people
- It should pick up nearly all the people who have the disease
What is risk reduction in healthcare?
- Screening a community for risk factors
- Both identifying the risk and removing it at source
- Reducing complications of a malfunctioning health system
- Reducing the risk that patients will sue the healthcare system
What is risk mitigation in healthcare?
- Trying to reduce the consequences of a risk
- Trying to reduce the risk altogether
- Moving a risk from one community to another
- The same as both primary and secondary prevention
What is the “one health” approach to reducing health risks?
- Providing all levels of care at one facility
- Trying to find one treatment that will improve a number of chronic health conditions
- Recognising that the health of people, animals and the environment are linked and dependent on each other
- Combining primary, secondary and tertiary prevention into a single service
What is a healthcare system?
- A plan to only provide healthcare to those who can afford private care
- A computer system which controls the distribution of funds
- A method of training health workers to be “patient friendly”
- Everything that is needed to provide healthcare to a population
What is a complex system?
- A system that is too complicated to be effective in a developing country
- A system that must have both the public and private sector as partners
- A system that is very expensive and needs overseas funding
- A system consisting of many parts that interact with each other
How can “systems thinking” help in providing healthcare?
- Most people agree than it cannot help
- It helps health workers remember appointments and responsibilities
- It helps people to understand that changing one part of the system affects the behaviour of the whole system
- It allows health workers to provide a service at a number of different facilities
Are private practitioners able to play a role in a national healthcare system?
- Yes as private practitioners can provide some services
- Only if the private practitioners are paid more than they earn in their own practices
- It is uncommon for them to play a role as they are too busy with their private patients
- No they cannot play a role as they are too expensive
What is governance in a healthcare system?
- The senior executive officer of the health system
- The head office where the senior executive officer of the health system works
- The process that sets the standards, outcomes and oversight of the system
- The accounting officer who is responsible for the financial management of the health system
What does accountability in a health system mean?
- Taking responsibility for clearly defined and understood tasks.
- Obtaining adequate funds for the service
- Counting the number of patients admitted each day
- Attempting to fill all the vacant posts
What happens if there is poor governance?
- The staff are less stressed
- The cost of managing the service decreases
- Standards fall and outcomes are poor
- Doctors and nurses are able to make their own decisions to improve care
What is a vertical health programme?
- The most effective way of providing general healthcare
- A way of making an impact on a particular condition or disease
- A programme that helps health workers get rapid promotion and improved salaries
- A method of fast referral of patients from a clinic to the district hospital
“Increasing human capacity” in a health system includes:
- Making sure there is very strong job security
- Giving people the skills and confidence to improvise and adapt protocols to fit their local work environment
- Employing more facilitators and coordinators
- Focussing on vertical health systems
How easy is it to change a health system?
- With strict discipline it is easy
- With adequate funding it should be easy
- It is only easy in large organisations
- It is difficult as health systems are complex organisations