Improving Patient Care

519 Words2 Pages

Healthcare is a constantly changing field, where information, technology, and practices are always improving. This has been especially true over the past half century. As a result, there have been drastic improvements in caring for patients. However, with these improvements, we have seen unanticipated issues which have actually hindered the ability for healthcare providers to care for patients. Rapid improvements in healthcare have caused various patient populations to survive longer, which means that healthcare workers need to meet the needs of a more varied group. Likewise, with rapid progress comes the issue of constantly learning new information. A healthcare provider who is not continuously trained on the latest practices and information …show more content…

These aims are generalized, so that they never become outdated. If these aims are followed and reached, the aforementioned issues will be mitigated. These aims instruct healthcare to be safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable (“Crossing the Quality,” 2001). Healthcare covers a wide array of different services, so these aims can take on a different form depending on the services that are rendered to the patient. Also, many of these goals of patient care overlap, so developing a concise way of caring for patients will ensure that healthcare providers are providing the most up to date patient care possible. A great example of a concise implementation of these aims is the list of 2016 National Patient Safety Goals for the hospital setting. These goals include identifying patients correctly, improving staff communication, the safe use of medicines, the safe use of alarms, preventing infection, identifying patient safety risks, and preventing mistakes in surgery (“National Patient Safety,” 2016). In this list, you can see multiple aims present in a single safety goal. For example, the safe use of medicines includes the aims of healthcare to be safe, effective, patient-centered, and

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