Our institution has committed to improving the quality and safety of patient care. According to Owens, Limcangco, Barrett, Heslin, & Moore, between 2011 and 2014, there was a reduction of 6 to 64 % with the number of patient safety and adverse events (2018). An adverse event is an event that results in an injury to a patient as an outcome of medical care and the Office of Inspector General estimated that these events cost $324 million for one month and $4.4 billion a year (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, n.d.). Not only do our patients suffer, but our medical personnel and nurses also suffer and are devastated by these events. These events can affect performance and additionally jeopardize safety. As nurses, we strive for the best possible outcome results with the least complications in the patients in our care. …show more content…
These developments advance at a rapid rate. However, human nature is slow to change and does not change as rapidly as technology does. The minute we learn or get accustomed to new computer systems or devices, it is immediately followed by updates that we have to relearn. Technology may improve health outcomes; however, technology may also be the source of health care errors. One reason for errors is that these technologies have technicians and experts that have the better understanding of these types of equipment and these experts are not our nurses who have to use them in their field. We have to lessen the risks that could occur. Decreasing errors can be obtained by changing the way we organize work and actively participating in adverse events education and safety. Human factors engineering is a tool that could be utilized to lessen adverse events and
Hospitals are busy places, and with so much going on it is hard to believe that mistakes are not made. However, there are some accidents that should never happen. Such events have been termed ‘never events’ because they are never supposed to happen. This term was first introduced by Ken Kizer, MD, in 2001 (US, 2012). The Joint Commission has classified never events as sentinel events and asks that hospitals report them. A sentinel event is defined as, “an unexpected occurrence involving death or serious physiological or psychological injury, or the risk thereof” (US, 2012). Never events are termed sentinel events because in the past 12 years 71% of the events reported were fatal (US, 2012). Because these events are never supposed to happen, many insurance companies will not reimburse the hospitals when they occur. A study in 2006, showed that the average hospital could experience a case of wrong-site surgery, one example of a never event, only once every 5 to 10 years (US, 2012). This study illustrates how rare a never event is. Hospitals do not want these never events to happen any more than a patient does. To help prevent these errors, hospitals have created policies that, if followed, will minimize the possibility of a mistake. The consequences of never events are devastating and because of this the goal is to make sure that they are eradicated from hospitals and medical facilities.
Technological advances enable nurses to provide accurate, timely care for a patient. This is due to the fact that these advances enable doctors and nurses to quickly diagnose, explain and predict the health-illness status of a patient, thus allowing health care professionals to spend less time finding answers, and more time providing quality care. For nurses, this includes spending time with the patient establishing rapport, communication and a trusting relationship for optimum clinical care.
Woo, A., Ranji, U., & Salganicoff, A. (2008). Reducing medical errors with technology. Retrieved March, 2012, from http://kaiseredu.org
Patient safety is the basis of quality health care in the hospital. Works applied to patient safety and practices that have not prevented hazard have focused on negative outcomes of care, such as mortality and morbidity. Healthcare employees are important to the surveillance and coordination that will reduce such adverse effects.
Integrating safety into nursing practice, education and research has a lot of significant implications for the instructor, practitioner, patient and the facility’s management. These are discussed below in detail.
When a person chooses to become a nurse they make a moral commitment to care for all patients. This commitment cannot be taken lightly, as stated in the Code of Ethics for Nurses “The nurse respects the worth, dignity, and rights of all human beings irrespective of the nature of the health problem” (American Nurses Association, 2001, 7). Therefore, three ethical considerations that impact the safe practice of nursing will be explored in further details. These ethical considerations include substance use disorder in the workplace, professional boundaries, and the use of social media. Since Florence Nightingale’s era, nurses have been faced with various stresses. The goal is that nurses will be safe practitioners respecting
Working as a nurse, patient care associate, or any other health care professional is not an easy job. Nursing profession has the highest rate of back and other injuries related to lifting, moving and transporting patients. Hospitals and other nursing facilities were experiencing increased numbers of injuries, which meant many lost work days, worker’s compensation costs and patient safety at risk.
Each year this panel of experts put a microscope on patient safety across the board. They decide where upmost attention needs to be paid. Sometimes items leave the list because there are been strides take to improve in that area and sometimes it continues to stay on the list because they believe the relevance and importance is growing. Healthcare is evolving b...
Grissinger, M., & Globus, N. J. (2004). How technology affects your risk of medication errors.Nursing2004, 34(1), 36-41. Retrieved from www.nursingcenter.com
Aviation is the safest means of transportation. However, accidents happen from time to time. As a matter of fact, approximately 80 percent of all aviation accidents are caused by human errors. The part within these 80 percent which is contributed to maintenance related errors or faults is estimated by 6 to 25. Obviously aircraft has become safer over the years so that the causes for aircraft accidents have changed from technical faults to human errors. Simply spoken, the term human factors involves working to make the environment function in way that seems natural to people. Although the terms human factors and ergonomics have not been widely known in recent times, it is design to improve the aviation safety. The basic definition of human factors is the relations between human and humans, human and machines, human and working processes and humans and their environment. In EASA PART 145 also has stated that personnel requirements and responsibilities must be respect to human factors. Human factors principles must apply to all aeronautical design, certification, training, operations, and maintenance for the safety of interface between human and other system components by proper consideration of human performance. Human performance means human capabilities and limitations which have an impact on the safety and efficiency of aeronautical operations.
Keeping patients safe is essential in today’s health care system, but patient safety events that violate that safety are increasing each year. It was only recently, that the focus on patient safety was reinforced by a report prepared by Institute of medicine (IOM) entitled ” To err is human, building a safer health system”(Wakefield & Iliffe,2002).This report found that approx-imately 44,000 to 98,000 deaths occur each year due to medical errors and that the majority was preventable. Deaths due to medical errors exceed deaths due to many other causes such as like HIV infections, breast cancer and even traffic accidents (Wakefield & Iliffe, 2002). After this IOM reports, President Clinton established quality interagency coordination task force with the help of government agencies. These government agencies are responsible for making health pol-icies regarding patient safety to which every HCO must follow (Schulman & Kim, 2000).
Technology is stated as the scientific method and material used to achieve a commercial or industrial objective. To go one step further, nursing technology is using a tool to advance nursing practice. “The Institute of medicine identified that technology as a viable method of enhancing patient care delivery and improving staff productivity” Sensmeier, Horowitz (2003 page). Because inadequate nursing staff causes shortcuts to be taken, there are mistakes made that could have possibly been prevented. Errors by nursing staff were variously reported as being responsible for between 44,000 and 98,000 hospital deaths per year. Sensmeier, Horowitz (2003). Technology can have a large impact on nursing. In the past 5 to 10 years, computerized patient records have increased less than 10%. This number shows us that we are still not embracing technology to its full potential. Today in most hospital systems computerized electronic charting is being used. Many hospitals have many different systems for...
In the year 1999, the Institute of Medicine published To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, bringing a serious concern regarding a lack of quality care in the healthcare setting to light; a startling statistic claimed that up to 98,000 hospital deaths occur yearly due to medical errors (Kohn, 1999). As humans, errors are sometimes unavoidable. Kohn (1999), however, discusses that by "designing systems that make it hard for people to do the wrong thing and easy for people to do the right thing" (p. ix) these errors can be minimized.
INTRODUCTION In order to achieve a high quality of healthcare delivery, the standard of care must be viewed in various perspectives. Apart from acknowledging patient’s perception of the healthcare delivery standard, it is also important to understand how patient safety is cultivated in an organization. Research showed that, the safety and efficient care require all these elements to be well integrated and coordinated (1). As we can see nowadays, the elements of Patient Safety Culture (PSC) have been an important dimension in any of the quality assessments for a healthcare organization in order to achieve awards and recognitions by the accreditation bodies, be it locally or internationally (2).The concept of PSC sparkled substantially upon
Although workplace accidents are very common, the majority of them can be prevented. As a company, you are obliged by the law to protect your employees, so it is important to take the necessary actions that will minimize the risk of accidents (Intelligent HQ, 2015).