On my first day of clinical at the General Hospital, I was placed in a group. The group consists of eight (8) persons (including myself). We were placed in the female medical ward. Our preceptor Nurse Williams introduced and welcomed us to the nursing field. During this induction, I was given a paper which contained a list of items that I had to identify and locate in the ward. While walking with our preceptor and locating the items, I had the opportunity to asses and identify patient safety hazards. While doing my safety assessment, I identified four (4) safety hazards that pose a risk to patient falls and potential injury. These hazards were IV poles blocking exit doors, floor on patient bathroom was wet, one patient had a call bell which …show more content…
Identifying patient safety hazard reduce falls and prevent further pain or injury to patient. Also, it is important to locate and familiarize oneself to the location of medical equipments and environment to make it easy to work efficiently and effectively in the hospital setting.
Learning
My way of thinking has certainly changed and I learn that anything can happen at any time. This experience taught me to be more aware of my environment and that there are always risks for falls and injury at the hospital. As a result, I must be mindful of these hazards and able to identify, assess, identify patient need, made diagnosis and interventions to alleviate falls and injury. Patient care is apriority and I should always be aware of that. Identifying four (4) health hazards made me feel as a hero (an advocate) and at the same time
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Being on time is critical for a nurse. We started our day by listening to the handover and then we were placed in groups of two. Each group was assigned to a particular patient. Our preceptor was near at our side. We started to check vital signs and I performed a full head to toe assessment. Before we began, I washed my hands. My team mate and I introduced ourselves to the patient and explained what we were going to do. We maintained patient privacy by pulling across the curtains at the patient bedside. We identified patient safety and ensured environment was safe for patient and for us as we performed our head to toe and vital check. As I did the assessment we practiced Peplau’s theory. We documented our results on our notebook and patient chart. Following the vitals check and head to toe assessment we debrief our finding to our preceptor. Next, we prepared ourselves to observe wound care. My preceptor chose me to wipe the dressing trolley. I put on my gloves and started to wipe. I was immediately corrected my nurse on the ward to showed me the proper way to wipe the cart. I was happy because I learned to do something that I never had the experience of how to do before. Nursing is indeed a learning experience. My teammates set up the dressing tray and two persons were chosen to perform a dressing change; one acted as the “dirty nurse” the other as the “sterile nurse”. As practiced, we checked for
I was then introduced to a patient who was in isolation. Her legs were immovable and were crossed in a very uncomfortable position. I wish I could’ve done something so that her legs could be in a more comfortable position, but all I could do was observe and get her a cup of ice cold water to drink. During this clinical observation, I didn’t get to see much but overall, it was a good experience. It made me realize what it was like to be in a hospital setting and what it meant to be a nurse. Seeing how the patients were still able to smile through all the pain they went through, it made me want to become a nurse even more because I would also like to make my patients happy. If I could do one thing differently during this clinical observation, I wish I didn’t ask my senior nurse about what externships she took and instead, I wished I asked her more questions about the patients in order to gain more information about
Introduction 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,
Within the Care Industry the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (2010) stated that “nursing aides, orderlies and attendants had the highest rate of musculoskeletal disorders of all occupations in 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.
It is difficult to answer whether or not Robin Hood really existed as over time the story of Robin Hood has been changed, but most sources say that he did exist around the time of King Richard the Lionheart.
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 fundamental to quality health and nursing care. This nurse leader believes that the health care workers have a great role to improve patient safety. Infection control, safe handling and administration of medications, safe handling of equipments, safe clinical practice and safe environment of care are included in patient safety. Proper training and education are vital ingredients of development of patient safety. This nurse leader is an advocate in all aspects of patient care. Nurses have to inform the patients, the plan of care, explain the treatment and its options, notify the adverse effects on time through the appropriate channel or requirement of the facility ("Patient Safety," 2002, p. 1).
This paper explores four different strategies to help improve patient safety. Burston, S., Chaboyer, W., Wallis, M., and Stanfield, J. (2011) suggests that there are three approaches to transforming care: Transforming Care at the Bedside, Releasing Time to Care: The Productive Ward, and the work of the Studer Group. Sheerwood (2015) suggests that patient safety comes from the individual and group values, attitudes, competencies, and patterns of behavior. The collective commitment or mindset to the safety of the individuals in an organization that determines achievement of patient safety goals. Vaismoradi, M., Salsali, M., and Marck, P. (2011) did a study about how well nursing students understood concepts of patient safety and how the designers of the nursing curriculum should go beyond theoretical concepts of education and application of knowledge of patient safety. The final article, Battie, R., and Steelman, V. is about the accountability of the nurse and other healthcare professionals.
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,
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).
Compromised Patient Safety Reflection Maintaining patient safety is a critical component of nursing practice. Reflecting on experiences where patient safety was potentially compromised can provide valuable insights and inform future practice. "The accuracy of drug dosage calculations is clinically important due to the potential for serious health consequences in patients" (Williams & Davis, 2016, p. 145). Reflecting on previous experiences, effective strategies are needed to improve medication calculation skills. Two key strategies are regular practice, review, utilizing study groups, and tutoring.
Safety is a very important topic in the hospital settings. Hospitals are constantly trying to improve the safety of their patients. One important safety issue is “reduce the risk of patient harm resulting from falls” (Zerwekh & Garneau, 2015, p. 509). Working in a hospital myself, I remember discussing patient fall risks daily.
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 is the prevention of harm resulting from errors leading to adverse events. Therefore, it becomes essential to develop a sense of safety, that may as well be common to all participating in patient care; an interdisciplinary approach to safety that ensure the common interest regarding this issue and its prevention, and for the attainment of a safe environment within an institution. Likewise, Mitchell, (2008), explains that patient safety was defined by the IOM as “the prevention of harm to patients.” Moreover, patient safety is now recognized in many countries, with global awareness fostered by the World Health Organization’s World Alliance for Patient Safety (Emanuel et. al., 2008).
1.1 Background In high hazard industries, errors and accidents may lead to terrible outcomes. Patient safety is an important public health issue worldwide. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a person on an airplane has 1 in 1,000,000 chances of being harmed, whereas, a patient has a 1 in 300 chances of being harmed in a healthcare facility. A hospitalized patient has a 14% chance of developing an infection, which may be prevented with an extra precaution and appropriate hygiene.