Summary: Improving Patient Safety

Frederich Nietzsche once wrote, “What are man’s truths ultimately? Merely his irrefutable errors” (2006). The Institute of Medicine defines patient safety as the “freedom from accidental injury due to medical care” and defines medical error as “the failure of a planned action to be completed as intended or the use of a wrong plan to achieve an aim including problems in practice, products, procedures, and systems” (Kohn). In healthcare, failures like these can be significant, or even fatal. The responsibility falls upon each individual working in the healthcare industry to ensure these errors do not occur-it is everyone’s problem.

It is estimated that one half to two thirds of medical errors, or inpatient adverse events, are attributable to

Not only are there far too many surgical errors taking place, the data suggesting half of the errors could have been avoided entirely is staggering. As the incidences of error in surgical procedures continue to rise, a four-part intervention must occur to solve this problem at the core: 1) the issue at hand must be diagnosed and analyzed, 2) programs must be created to solve or at least reduce these problems, 3) the solutions must last for the long-term, and lastly 4) the solution should be used to solve other problems in the healthcare

Their needs to be a honed focus on the issue at hand, a proposal for a sufficient solution that will last long-term, and lastly, the success of the solution can be translated to solve other issues. All doing their part, The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Department of Veterans Affairs, Food and Drug Administration, Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, and the Institute of Medicine, have all developed programs aimed at improving safety measures across the realm of healthcare including surgical procedures (Patients Safety in American Hospitals, 2004). As the list of organizations making similar improvements grows larger, the future is bright for positive