The Contemporary World

(Student Digest)

Critical Reflection

Mcdonaldization on the Healthcare System

 McDonaldization is the theory of George Ritzer as an update to Max Weber’s theory of
bureaucracy. He stated that in the latter part of the twentieth century the social structure of the
fast-food chains has become the organizational force that represents and expands the process of
rationalization in the areas of everyday interaction and personal identity. The growth of
McDonald's fast-food chain serves as his model in his interpretation, which is why it is called
McDonaldization. He defined McDonaldization as the process of globalization where the
principles of fast-food chains are used to dominate sectors of American society as well as the rest
of the world. It is a phenomenon that happens when society adapted the same characteristics
found in fast-food chains, including efficiency, calculability, predictability and standardization,
and control.
McDonaldization indeed bring a great impact to the modern society, as for its meaning it
brought efficiency which minimizes the time required for finishing a task, calculability as it
focuses more on quantity over quality, predictability as it makes repetitively and routinized in
doing such works or rendering services to people, and control as making people act uniformly or
consistently the same on a daily basis. McDonaldization produces both good and bad outcomes
for society. As for the advantages of McDonaldization, it helps people get an easier way to life.
For example, through a fast-food chain, we easily get food that we wanted as it provides faster
services, more affordable prices of products, and fair treatment to all customers. But
McDonaldization also has its downfall or disadvantages. As McDonaldization helps provide
faster services and more affordable products it sacrifices the quality of a product. For example,
for making a specific product, companies use cheaper materials to provide cheap products and
focus on making many products, not minding the effect of its quality on the consumers.
Healthcare is one of the necessities of an individual in their everyday life. Taking care of
our health is a necessity and need that we should provide or give to ourselves. Healthcare
professionals are people that are assigned to take care of our health. They are the people that play
a critical role in enhancing the quality of our life by enhancing our health. Healthcare
professionals’ jobs require an extrovert personality to interact with their patients as it requires
them to create a special bond with their patients. To provide the proper medical attention that a
patient needs for their medical condition a healthcare provider must know a patient to a personal
extent to identify the proper care they needed because a different patient requires different
treatment.
Nurses help doctors in taking care of patients such as observing and assessing patients’
conditions. They are the ones who monitor and evaluate charts of patients to report to the
physicians. They take a big role in taking care of the patients as they are the ones who directly
take care of the patients and create a closer bond of relationship to them than the physician. But
now nurses only seem like assistants or fellows who ran errands and followed physicians’
commands. And their job become is to follow standard operating procedures and somehow
replace by types of machinery. Sadly, their job now is based on how fast they can carry out their
job and not how well they did it
McDonaldization changes our healthcare system in a variety of ways. The key aspects of
McDonaldization; efficiency, calculability, and predictability also affect the healthcare system
that we have now. In the past, before McDonaldization healthcare professionals invest time and
effort to get to know their patients to a personal level to create a more precise or accurate
diagnosis to provide proper medical care their condition requires. To become efficient, medical
assistants now take over the things that doctors did like getting patients’ temperature, blood
pressure, and other medical tests that should be done. Patients also answer questionnaires given
by medical assistants to decrease the time of a patient with the doctor, which causes the doctors
to lose the doctor-patient relationship, leading to an inexact diagnosis. In the aspect of
calculability, the patients are greatly affected as the cost of medical healthcare now becomes
based on the time they spent with the doctor and pieces of machinery used to examine them
making them more focused on how much the care they receive might cause rather than the
quality of care they received. While predictability or standardization has had the greatest impact
on the medical system.. As it is said that every patient requires different medical care depending
on their medical condition this aspect of McDonaldization obstructs medical professionals from
properly performing their jobs. A visit to the doctor has become a routine like a process where
medical assistants will inform the doctor of the patient’s arrival while the patient is filling out
necessary paper works and the nurse is taking initial medical measures or tests like taking
temperature, pulse rate, blood pressure and notes of his/her finding from that little interaction.
After that, the patient will have an interview-like interaction with the doctor telling the patient's
symptoms. Each step must be aligned with the clinical guidelines, which made every patient visit
predictable to uniform everyone’s visits.
McDonaldization is continuously affecting our society’s healthcare system leading it to
become more efficient, calculable, and predictable. It has made the healthcare system to be
organized and uniform by following such medical guidelines but it is actually a bad outcome
because as patient’s cases also become uniform it hinders the doctors from accurately diagnosing
and treating a patient which if continuously implemented might result in the downfall of the
whole healthcare system as they don’t provide quality services anymore. To sum up,
McDonaldization may seem that it affects the healthcare system in a positive manner and ways
because it made the healthcare system works faster but it actually deteriorates the healthcare
system especially the relationship between healthcare professionals and patients that is very
important in the healthcare system. It may help the healthcare system to work efficiently but it
led the healthcare system’s quality to fall down as the quality and purpose of the healthcare
system slowly changed due to McDonaldization.

References:
Vesagas, P.J. (2015, October 27). ‘Mcdonaldization’ of nurses. Sunstar Philippines. Retrieved.
November 17, 2021
from .https://www.sunstar.com.ph/article/39026/Local-News/McDonaldization-of-nurses
Crossman, Ashley. (2021, February 16). McDonaldization: Definition and Overview of the
Concept. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/mcdonaldization-of-society-3026751
All Answers Ltd. (November 2018). Impact of McDonaldization on Healthcare. Retrieved from
https://nursinganswers.net/essays/impact-of-mcdonaldization-on-healthcare.php?vref=1