There are a large number of professional organizations specific to healthcare. One such organization The Joint Commission, is a non-profit independent organization that certifies and accredits over 19,000 healthcare organizations in the United States. [Their mission statement is] “to continuously improve health care for the public, in collaboration with other stakeholders, by evaluating health care organizations and inspiring them to excel in providing safe and effective care of the highest quality and value” (The Joint Commission, 2011). The National Patient Safety Goals were implemented 2002. The goals later became effective January 1, 2003 to address specific areas of concern in regards to patient safety. Upon implementation, these goals have been effective in reducing the number of medication errors, improving communication between healthcare providers, and reducing hospital-acquired infections in patients.
Thousands of individuals are admitted each year and require medication in the hospital
setting. With the increasing number of admissions due to disease and illness affecting today’s
society leads to the likelihood of nurses committing medication errors. Over the years errors
resulting from medication have been the leading cause of injury in hospitalized patients. Forty
six percent of these medication errors occurred at the time of admission, time of discharge or
while transferring patients between units. [After reviewing these events], “The Joint Commission identified “Improve the Safety of Using Medications” as one of the 2009 National Patient Safety Goals (Cleveland Clinic, 2009, p.1). In relation to this safety goal, hospitals created a medication reconciliation form that resides in the patient’s ch...
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...before a procedure, shaving is avoided and clippers are used to trim the hair. This reduces the risks of breaks in the skin. In addition, one hour before surgery the patient is administered antibiotics before the incision and discontinued within twenty-four hours.
The National Patient Safety Goals are a key when it comes to patient safety. Implementing safety goals helps reduce the number of medication errors, improves communication between members of the healthcare team and reduces the number of infections patients acquire while under the hospital’s care. In addition, The Joint Commission reviews and publishes these goals each year. Depending on the occurrence of sentinel events, the goals are re-evaluated or revised accordingly. It is important that The Joint Commission reinforce the practice of patient safety goals in that they help improve patient care.
Orlando Regional Healthcare, Education & Development. (2004). Patient Safety: Preventing Medical Errors. Retrieved on March 2014 from world wide web at http://www.orlandohealth.com/pdf%20folder/patient%20safety.pdf
Safety competency is essential for high-quality care in the medical field. Nurses play an important role in setting the bar for quality healthcare services through patient safety mediation and strategies. The QSEN definition of safety is that it “minimizes risk of harm to patients and providers through both system effectiveness and individual performance.” This papers primary purpose is to review and better understand the importance of safety knowledge, skills, and attitude within nursing education, nursing practice, and nursing research. It will provide essential information that links health care quality to overall patient safety.
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)
Safety is focused on reducing the chance of harm to staff and patients. The 2016 National Patient Safety Goals for Hospitals includes criteria such as using two forms of identification when caring for a patient to ensure the right patient is being treated, proper hand washing techniques to prevent nosocomial infections and reporting critical information promptly (Joint Commission, 2015). It is important that nurses follow standards and protocols intending to patients to decrease adverse
The purpose of this paper is to identify a quality safety issue. I will summarize the impact that this issue has on health care delivery. In addition, I will identify quality improvement strategies. Finally, I will share a plan to effectively implement this quality improvement strategy.
Nurses are expected to provide a competent level of care that is indicative of their education, experience, skill, and ability to act on agency policies or procedures. In a study of 1,116 hospitals Bond, Raehl, and Franke (2001) found, “Medication errors occurred in 5.07% of the patients admitted each year to these hospitals. Each hospital experienced a medication error every 22.7 hours (every 19.73 admissions). Medication errors that adversely affected patient care outcomes occurred in 0.25% of all patients admitted to these hospitals/year”(p. 4). This means at least one medication error occurs every 24 hours in those facilities studied, and these are preventable errors. The main responsibilities of nurses when administering medications are to prevent or catch error, and report such error. Even if the physician or prescribing health care professional has made a mistake in the order, it is the nurse’s job to question the
Patients Safety is the most crucial about healthcare sector around the world. It is defined as ‘the prevention of patients harm’ (Kohn et al. 2000). Even thou patient safety is shared among organization members, Nurses play a key role, as they are liable for direct and continuous patients care. Nurses should be capable of recognizing the risk of patients and address it to the other multi disciplinary on time.
A culture of safety requires the commitment of leadership to positively impact outcomes. Recent emphasis on the new CMS guidelines and third party reimbursement initiatives associated with patient outcomes, has grabbed the attention of leadership at all healthcare organizations. Additionally, our system wide organization’s employee culture of safety survey has shown that communication and teamwork are areas were improvements are needed. Years of research on communication and teamwork in highly reliable organizations support a correlation with safety. (XX) One of the most important and highly touted Joint Commission, National Patient Safety Goals is to improve communication across the healthcare continuum. (JC .com) Additionally, the organization’s patient occurrences were reviewed through root cause analysis and the source is often linked to a failure to effectively communicate and role confusion. Well defined roles within the team model can help improve communication, including mitigating variables such as distractions, individual emphasis on the wrong information, and a breakdown in communication. (XXX) Implementation of a formal teamwork program is one way to systematically approach risk reduction within an organization. (Botwinick, L., Bisognano, M., & Harden, C., 2006) (Leonard, M., Frankel, A., Federico, F., Frush, K., & Haraden, C., 2013)
O’Daniel, M., & A.H., R. (2008). Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Nurses. Rockville: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Retrieved from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2637/
All health care organizations are responsible for providing the best care possible to its patients. While accidents happen, there is evidence that indicated many adverse events are preventable. The use of safety practices such as crew resource management, computerized physician order entry, and bar coding, are a few strategies that could avoid safety and medical errors (Mitchell, 2008). All health care managers should take action to avoid common, yet dangerous patient safety issues such as, healthcare associated infections and hygiene issues. In 2014, death by medical mistakes hit an all-time record of 400,000 people a year and cost the United States close to 1 trillion dollars (McCann, 2014). Avoiding medical errors is a team effort and is established within a safety minded culture within a hospital. Communication between staff and a strong leadership can ultimately make these unnecessary occurrences a thing of the
The Joint Commission was founded in 1951 with the goal to provided safer and better care to all. Since that day it has become acknowledged as the leader in developing the highest standards for quality and safety in the delivery of health care, and evaluating organization performance (The Joint Commission(a) [TJC], 2014). The Joint Commission continues to investigate ways to better patient care. In 2003 the first set of National Patient Safety Goals (NPSGs) went into effect. This list of goals was designed by a group of nurses, physicians, pharmacists, risk managers, clinical engineers, and other professionals with hands-on experience in addressing patient safety issues in a wide variety of healthcare settings (TJC(b), 2014). The NPSGs were created to address specific areas of concern in patient safety in all health care settings.
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.
The overall goal for the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) plan is to meet the challenge of educating and preparing future nurses to have the knowledge, skills and attitudes that are essential to frequently progress the quality and safety of the healthcare systems in the continuous improvement of safe practice (QSEN, 2014).Safety reduces the possibility of injury to patients and nurses. It is achieved through system efficiency and individual work performance. Organizations determine which technologies have an effective protocol with efficient practices to support quality and safety care. Guidelines are followed to reduce potential risks of harm to nurses or others. Appropriate policies
The first nurse to introduce quality improvement was Florence Nightingale, who through gathering data on the positive effects of keeping adequate hygiene, nutrition and proper ventilation on the mortality rate during the Crimean War (Hood, 2014, p. 490-491). The initiatives towards improvement of quality lead to formation the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals (JCAH), which is now known as The Joint Commission (2007). The Joint Commission is non-profit organization which gives accreditation to hospitals for recognizing their efforts to deliver quality health care with an added advantage of being eligible for the Medicare reimbursement program. Moreover, the Joint Commission also rolled out the Hospital Patient Safety Goals (2013) to prevent patient safety errors. Nursing professionals are essential for health care organizations to achieve and maintain the patient-safety goals as their work directly impacts the quality and safety of the patients. For instance, using two patient identifiers during medication administration to avert errors. Nurses have the distinct skills and responsibility towards patient safety and hence the need for Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) is the rational step towards quality improvement. Through the years, the QSEN has developed in Phases to ascertain the areas of competency requirements for nurses to deliver safe, efficient and excellent health care
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).