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The essentials of patient safety
The essentials of patient safety
Patient safety
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Patient safety should be a top priority. Hospitals must have a plan in advance to protect health care personnel while providing care to victims. Hospitals are required to have an Emergency Operations Plan (EOP) basically describes how a facility will respond and recover from hazards. Maintaining a safe environment reflects a level of compassion for patient welfare. Terrorist goals are not the greatest number of deaths but the maximum amount of fear and chaos.
One procedure that is essential is to inform, educate, and empower people about issues. Providing patients and also employees with easy accessible information will help the hospital during an emergency. The staff at the hospitals need to be trained on the exits and how to proceed
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Government legislation is what provides works with minimum standards of health and safety in the workplace. Health and safety provides a legal backbone to protect works only when supported by the government. Patients should be guaranteed safety to the hospital they are admitted in. To implement this effectively people have to be familiar with the laws and safety that protects them.
Thirdly, developing policies and plans that support individual and community health efforts. The EOP it would support the ability of a healthcare organization to coordinate information and external resources during an incident. Each organization must conduct and annually review their EOP. This can also be done by enforcing sanitation codes, laws, and monitoring quality of care.
Lastly, assuring competent public and personal health care workforce. The purpose of training and education is to ensure individual knowledge and team approaches with shared knowledge towards prevention. This means implementing procedures for licensure, education, training, and assessment of staff. Healthcare professionals need to have knowledge of policies and procedures in case any security risk come up. There are constant changes in healthcare so they need to be updated with the changes that
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This would include identifying systems and applications and determine their impact. This is where to determine the impact of patients and how care is delivered. Each organization should establish a remote data center or work with electronic health record vendors to determine service level agreements. HIPPA disaster recovery requirements require the need for ePHI data backup plan in case of an emergency situation.
The second measure would be personal health records. The ability to exchange information during the event of an emergency is essential to improving the emergency response for everyone. Professionals need to be prepared to assist with the release and transfer of medical records. PHR would organize patient health history and document health conditions, medications, contact information, providers name, medical history, and special needs. Patients would own and manage their health information. It wouldn't replace the legal health record maintained by
In order to prevent or lessen the impact of a critical situation on the hospital and ensure appropriate level of se...
The Patient Safety Plan is a program that provides a systematic, coordinated and continuous methodology to the upkeep and upgrading of safety through the founding of mechanisms that support effective responses to definite incidences in an organization work environment. It is also the incorporation of patient safety main concern into new strategy in an organizational functions and services which would lead to continuous positive decrease of risk in the work environment. Patient safety plan is used as a guide to approach optimum safety objectives which involves different departments and disciplines in creating plans, processes and devices that contain the patient care safety activities in a hospital setting (Main Line Health Inc, 2011)
An electronic health record (EHR), or electronic medical record (EMR), refers to the systematized collection of patient and population electronically-stored health information in a digital format. It details medical problems, medications, vital signs, patient history, immunizations, laboratory data and radiology reports, progress notes .These records can be shared across different health care settings. It resides on an enterprise information systems and is exchanged via electronic networks.EHRs may include a range of data, including demographics, medical history, medication and allergies, immunization status, laboratory test results, radiology images, vital signs, personal statistics like age and weight, and billing information.why is it needed? It seeks to be a complete record of a patient that can follow him/her from setting to setting increasing knowledge and consistency. It allows providers to obtain a complete picture of a patient and allows firms to automate and streamline workflows. It could improve patient and financial outcomes via evidence-based decisions, quality management, data mining, tracking, and reporting.
Vital improvement for patient safety has triggered an enormous amount of positive change in the healthcare system. There were “1.6 million adverse events each year that led to 180,000 deaths” (Liang & Mackey, 2011). In a review, avoidable errors led to $19.5 billion dollars in healthcare expenses (Liang & Mackey, 2011). The National Patient Safety Agency analyzed 425 deaths from acute care hospitals and found “15% of the deaths were related to unrecognized patient deterioration” (Higgins, Maries-Tillot, Quinton, & Richmond, 2008). This finding led to the Institute for Health Care Improvement’s promotion for the use of an early warning scoring system to assist with identifying deteriorating patients (Albert & Huesman, 2011).
Agencies include: Emergency Medical Services (EMS), other hospitals and clinics, laboratories, nursing homes/assisted living facilities, home health care agencies, mental and behavioral health and social services providers, liaisons to vulnerable populations, and other health and medical entities. All contacts and information must be recorded, including unsuccessful attempts, and any follow-up actions (CDC, 2011). Another step is assigning and deploying resources and assets. Effective allocation and monitoring of health resources and assets will be required to sustain 24-hour response operations (CDC, 2011). Examples includes medical supplies and equipment to treat patients, blood supplies, and safe water and
Behaviors to Improve Patient Safety. There are five behaviors in which I, as a health care professional, can practice in order to improve safety for patients in my direct care. These include following written safety protocols, speak up when you have concerns, communicate clearly, don’t let yourself get careless, and take care of yourself. By adhering to simple, basic protocols such as hand washing you can be a key player in reducing the spread of infection to your patients and thus, keeping your patients safe. As a healthcare professional you must be an advocate for your patients and their safety by reporting unsafe working conditions, close calls, and adverse events.
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.
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the National Patient Safety Goals (NPSGs) put out by The Joint Commission that went into effect January 1, 2014. The goal I chose to focus on is the first goal, improve the accuracy of patient identification. The element of performance within that goal I am going to concentrate on is to use at least two patient identifiers when administering medications (Joint Commission, 2013). The importance of this goal cannot be understated. Correctly identifying a patient prior to administering a medication is imperative to patient safety.
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.
Healthcare organizations that adopt this important aspect in their healthcare delivery models have an advantage in providing better service to their patients. Close interaction with healthcare professionals enables patients to make well-informed choices about managing their health. Often referred to as collective responsibility, the greatest impact happens when every health professional is involved in providing healthcare solutions. This includes medical experts working both within and outside their line of duty by assisting other healthcare professionals in providing their services. Through consistent sharing of information and experience among medical staff and with patients, complex medical problems and uncertainties concerning health choices and their outcomes are made easy, resulting in the delivery of quality healthcare.
Patient safety is caused by several factors in healthcare organizations. One factor is organization, which includes the organization culture, regulations, organizational policies and procedures. Environmental factor would be second. This includes workforce, resources, etc. The third is the human factor.
How dose informatics enhance or hinder safety for patients? If informatics is used correctly in the nursing process it can create a work environment where there is little to no patient complications. When informatics is used as a workaround, patient safety can be at risk. Informatics in the health care industry can provide cohesive and effective patient charting. Effective patient charting includes the patient’s history, medical problems, medications, and assessments done by each nurse.
These expectations should include solutions for errors and safety risks. If all individuals working in the health care facility work together in recognizing errors. Then there will be fewer safety risks and confusion in the clinical
The purpose of his article was to find a better way to prevent healthcare-associated infections (HCAI) and explain what could be done to make healthcare facilities safer. The main problem that Cole presented was a combination of crowded hospitals that are understaffed with bed management problems and inadequate isolation facilities, which should not be happening in this day and age (Cole, 2011). He explained the “safety culture properties” (Cole, 2011) that are associated with preventing infection in healthcare; these include justness, leadership, teamwork, evidence based practice, communication, patient centeredness, and learning. If a healthcare facility is not honest about their work and does not work together, the patient is much more likely to get injured or sick while in the
It helps patients in organizing their health information, educating them about personal health information, and assisting them with managing their health. For instance, a PHR can send alerts and reminders to patients about wellness checks as well as public safety notifications. Another key attribute is it allows the patient to own the PHR giving them the right to determine who has access and/or viewing rights to the information, unlike a legal health record. The information in PHR is continuously updated and can be linked to legal electronic health records. PHRs are private and secured and are interoperable as it allows for exchange of health information with many different systems.