Summary: Improving Patient Safety

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After reading the article regarding patient safety, there was a prominent area in which we still fall short in preventing and reducing medical errors. It is apparent there is a major problem with the system itself, yet hospitals and clinics haven’t come close to fixing the issue. Over the last 10 years, new laws and regulations have been made to improve patient safety conditions, however, the shortfall is occurring during this transition time. Two different issues can be blamed as the cause for this shortfall. The first issue is that it takes a great deal of time for hospitals and clinics to adopt and implement a new program. The process of implementing a new system is time consuming because employees are resistant to change and employee …show more content…

As mentioned in the article we know more about reducing medical errors now, but since we haven’t fixed the problem, the numbers are still extremely high. Almost every hospital has created a quality assurance team to discover methods to reduce the number of incidences seen; but unfortunately, this focus isn’t enough. I think the best way to speed up this process is by changing the focus of hospitals and clinics around the country. I feel that our system is so broken that we need to change it all together. Harvard Business Review has suggested that “we move away from a supply-driven health care system organized around what physicians do and move toward a patient-centered system organized around what patients need” (2013). Instead of having providers offer a full range of services, it would be best if they narrowed down their practice to provide treatment for certain medial conditions in order to provide a higher quality of care. By narrowing down the practice, this would make physicians experts in what they do, thus reducing errors at a faster pace. Also having a system that is focused more around the patient will force physicians to pay better attention to the care that they are giving. Hospitals that have already switched over to patient center care have seen a decrease in the number of errors because of the extra attention that is given to the patients by the physicians. This new process will take some time, but I think it will be faster than what they are trying to do now, because this method is proven to work, unlike the current

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