The Emergency Department is an interesting place especially for individuals who happen to work there. It is a fast-paced environment and presents a variety of situations of which require immediate, accurate, and most importantly, safe care. For some, the thought of working in an emergency department is an unpleasant one, but for those who thrive in fast-paced and often exciting environments it can be the optimal job description. However, it is imperative for those who work in emergency departments to be aware of the hazards and potential risks that evolve in that specific environment. This paper focuses on those risks by examining specific hazards that occur in emergency departments and how employees can minimize the risk of exposure to them through communication and teamwork as …show more content…
There are many hazards to be aware of when working in any emergency department. Several of those hazards can be thought of as common sense, such as keeping walkways free from objects that can cause slips and/or falls. However, each potential risk has a proper way to be dealt with, whether it is large or small, to ensure the safety of both employees and patients. The Occupational Safety & Health Administration provides a virtual eTool that lists potential hazards and helpful solutions to each one. Even though some might think slips and falls are a minor issue in an emergency department, it is one of the most common occurrences due to high traffic, spills on the floor, or obstructed walkways. It is important to keep spills cleaned up and objects out of walkways to prevent injuries. The immediateness of care required in an emergency department can make an employee susceptible to exposure
Orlando Regional Healthcare, Education & Development. (2004). Patient Safety: Preventing Medical Errors. Retrieved on March 2014 from world wide web at http://www.orlandohealth.com/pdf%20folder/patient%20safety.pdf
Good teamwork is important in a patient centred care. It is a team of health professionals who actively participate, cooperate, interact, communicate expertise, respect, trust and its main focus is to improve patient’s health (Miller, 2008, p.14). Also, the team includes the family of the client and the patient itself (Miller, 2008, p. 15). Therefore, all members have a role to play. For instance, in the nursing practice it involves health promotion and maintenance regarding patient’s health in order to decrease the impacts of negative outcomes (NMBA, 2010). Nevertheless, this can be maintained under the national competency standard (NMBA, 2010). Part of the national competency standard promotes professional responsibility, multidisciplinary approach, critical thinking and client care delivery (NMBA, 2010).
If patient safety is the most important issue in Health Care facilities then how come hospital inpatient falls continue to be the most reported of all accidental falls (Tzeng & Yin, 2009)? Throughout the years, hospitals continue to make changes to decrease the risk of accidents and increase the quality of patient safety. With research studies and improvements made, patient falls still hold the largest portion of reported incidents in hospitals (Tzeng, & Yin, 2008). According to Tzeng & Yin (2008), “fall prevention programs apparently do not effectively reduce inpatient fall rates because of human factors and ergonomics in a hospital environment (p.179, para. 2). The two studies reviewed in this paper were performed with the hopes of decreasing the high fall rate among inpatients.
The leading cause of injury to nursing and hospital staff is the repeated manual lifting, and lifting and transferring of patients. This increasing incident rates cost to healthcare organizations. “Safe Patient Handling” programs have become one of the top initiatives for healthcare organizations. With the help of this program, work-related injuries and injuries due to patient falls can be reduced. Hill-Rom’s high technologies, processes, and tools assist hospitals to enhance outcomes for patients.
In our organization we have had many revisions to our safety process. Originally, it was at our hospital that the 1996 well known “Willy King” incident, about the amputation of the “wrong” leg occurred. As a response to the incident, we were required to develop a root-cause-analysis and develop a plan to avoid similar situations in the future. We were one of the first hospitals to establish a “safety process” in the surgical environment. Through inter-disciplinary collaborati...
Safety is a primary concern in the health care environment, but there are still many preventable errors that occur. In fact, a study from ProPublica in 2013 found that between 210,000 and 440,000 patients each year suffer preventable harm in the hospital (Allen, 2013). Safety in the healthcare environment is not only keeping the patient safe, but also the employee. If a nurse does not follow procedure, they could bring harm to themselves, the patient, or both. Although it seems like such a simple topic with a simple solution, there are several components to what safety really entails. Health care professionals must always be cautious to prevent any mishaps to their patients, especially when using machines or lifting objects, as it has a higher
Patient safety one of the driving forces of healthcare. Patient safety is defined as, “ the absence of preventable harm to a patient during the process of healthcare or as the prevention of errors and adverse events caused by the provision of healthcare rather than the patient’s underlying disease process. (Kangasniemi, Vaismoradi, Jasper, &Turunen, 2013)”. It was just as important in the past as it is day. Our healthcare field continues to strive to make improvement toward safer care for patients across the country.
Patient safety is a major issue in health care, especially in the public sector. Studies show that as many as 10 patients get harmed daily as they receive care in stroke rehabilitation wards in hospitals in the United States alone. Patient safety refers to mechanisms for preventing patients from getting harmed as they receive health care services in hospitals. The issue of patient safety is usually associated with factors such as medication errors, wrong-site surgery, health care-acquired infections, falls, diagnostic errors, and readmissions. Patient safety can be improved through strategies such as improving communication within hospitals, increasing patient involvement, reporting adverse events, developing protocols and guidelines, proper management of human resources, educating health-care providers on the need for patient protection, and commitment of the leadership to the task. This paper talks about patient safety and how it can be improved in stroke rehabilitation wards of both public and private hospitals.
In a culture of safety and quality, all employees are focused on upholding quality in providing safe care. In order to promote patient safety in the hospital setting there should be an exhibition of teamwork irrespective of the different leadership positions. However the leaders show their obligation to quality and safety, and set capacities for their employees to perform a committed and critical role in assuring patient safety.
I believe that if you asked a group of people to list off issues regarding an emergency department then they would say long wait times throughout the process and being moved around to different areas of the emergency department. From what I have heard the long waits can be associated with waiting to get back to a room, waiting to see a nurse, waiting to see a doctor, waiting to go to radiology or lab, waiting on results, waiting to be discharged, or waiting to be admitted. All of these things in my opinion add up to one main problem, which is patient flow through an emergency department. In my opinion being able to have a controlled patient flow allows for improved wait times and decreased chaos for patients. So there are a few things
The rate of errors and situations are seen as chances for improvement. A great degree of preventable adversative events and medical faults happen. They cause injury to patients and their loved ones. Events are possibly able to occur in all types of settings. Innovations and strategies have been created to identify hazards to progress patient and staff safety. Nurses are dominant to providing an atmosphere and values of safety. As an outcome, nurses are becoming safety leaders in the healthcare environment(Utrich&Kear,
Sauer MS, Lauren, McCarthy ScD, Melissa, Knebel RN, Ann, and Brewster BS, Peter. 2009. Major Influences on Hospital Emergency Management and Disaster Preparedness
It is right of a patient to be safe at health care organization. Patient comes to the hospital for the treatment not to get another disease. Patient safety is the most important issue for health care organizations. Patient safety events cost of thousands of deaths and millions of dollars an-nually. Even though the awareness of patient safety is spreading worldwide but still we have to accomplish many things to achieve safe environment for patients in the hospitals. Proper admin-istrative changes are required to keep health care organization safe. We need organizational changes, effective leadership, strong health care policies and effective health care laws to make patients safer.
Personal protective equipment (PPE) in the health care setting is a crucial factor in keeping a safe environment for patients to receive care. Not only does PPE affect the health of the patients being treated, but it jeopardizes health care providers, visitors, and other patients throughout the unit. During my clinical experience at Emory University Hospital on floor 9E, I often observed patients, visitors, and health care providers failing to comply with the PPE hanging outside patient rooms. According to a study conducted in the United States, “researchers directly observed 104 doctors and nurses in performance of 12 trauma resuscitations. The results of the study indicated that full compliance was implemented in 3% of workers” (Powers, 16).
A hazard is defined as an activity or object that has the potential to cause harm if contact is made with the person, object or activity (MHS, 1996; Harmse, 2007; HSE, 2006). These hazards in a work place need to be identified and dealt with accordingly to prevent any harm to employees or any individual acquainted to a certain activity or establishment. The key roles and principles of occupational hygiene are Anticipation, Identification, Evaluation and Control (Schoeman and van den Heever, 2014; Harmse, 2008; SAMTRAC, 2012). To practise in accordance to the above principle; a hazard identification and risk assessment needs to be conducted. Anticipation is the foreseeing of the activity