Patient safety is concerned primarily with avoidance, prevention and amelioration of adverse outcomes or injuries stemming from healthcare. It should address events that span the continuum of ‘errors’ and ‘deviations’ to accidents (Vincent, 2006).
Over the last ten years, there has been a high surge of medical errors, which harm patients. This series of truly tragic health care cases, fail to provide safe healthcare and hence resulted into introducing safety measures and an urge to improve the quality of health services.
Institute of Medicine commenced its quality initiative in 1996 and issued reports documented on quality Gap which includes;
- National roundtable on Quality, the urgent need of improving the health care quality in 1998.
- National Cancer Policy Board, Ensuring Quality Cancer Care in 1999.
The burden of harm conveyed by the collective impact of all of our health care quality problem staggering (Chassin et al, 1998).
The main objective of launching Quality of Care in America Committee, in 1998, was to establish a plan to achieve a threshold improvement in the quality of health care over next ten years.
The first report was ‘To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System’ was presented by the committee on quality of Health Care in America. At that time, 44,000 to 98,000 deaths per year, were reported in America, although more people died from medical errors than from breast cancer, AIDS or motor vehicle (Bernnan et al, 1991; Thomas et al, 1999).Major causes of these reported death cases were merely, failures in the health system. Thus, prevention of errors requires establishing a safer system of care and became the need of the day. Media coverage about such matters expanded and became extensive, and end resul...
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...asm: A new health system for the 21st century. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
Ray, G. T., Lieu, T., Fireman, Collin, F., Colby, C. J., Quesenberry, C. P., Van Den Eeden, S. P., & Selby, J.V. (2001). The Cost of Health Condition in a Health Maintenance Organization. Medical Care Research and Review, 57(1), 92-109.
The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. (2000). Prescription Drug Trends – A Chartbook. Menlo Park: The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. (1996). Chronis Care in America: A 21st Century Challenge. Princeton: The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Thomas, E. J., Studdert, D. M., Newhouse, J. P., Zbar, B. I., Howard, K. M., Williams, E. J., & Brennan, T. A. (1999). Cost of Medical Injuries in Utah and Colorado. Inquiry. 36(3), 255-265.
Vincent, C. (2006). Patient Safety. London: Elsevier Health Sciences.
Margaret E. O’Kane is the founder and president of the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA). NCQA is one of the nation’s leading advocates for improving healthcare through measurement, reporting, and accountability. NCQA is the foremost accrediting organization for health plans including HMOs, PPOs, and consumer directed plans. (Margaret) “Our goal is to increase the value of NCQA accreditation both to organizations pursuing accreditation and to the audiences who seek help in assessing the quality of health care provided by those organizations”. NCQA has developed, maintained, and expanded the nation’s most widely used health care quality tool, which is known as the Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS). HEDIS is responsible for evaluating whether and how well
When one examines managed health care and the hospitals that provide the care, a degree of variation is found in the treatment and care of their patients. This variation can be between hospitals or even between physicians within a health care network. For managed care companies the variation may be beneficial. This may provide them with opportunities to save money when it comes to paying for their policy holder’s care, however this large variation may also be detrimental to the insurance company. This would fall into the category of management of utilization, if hospitals and managed care organizations can control treatment utilization, they can control premium costs for both themselves and their customers (Rodwin 1996). If health care organizations can implement prevention as a way to warrant good health with their consumers, insurance companies can also illuminate unnecessary health care. These are just a few examples of how the health care industry can help benefit their patients, but that does not mean every issue involving physician over utilization or quality of care is erased because there is a management mechanism set in place.
Yong, Pierre L., Robert Samuel Saunders, and LeighAnne Olsen. The Healthcare Imperative: Lowering Costs and Improving Outcomes : Workshop Series Summary. Washington, D.C.: National Academies, 2010. Print.
Stephen Jonas, Raymond G, Karen G, “An Introduction to the US healthcare System” 6th Edition, Page 118, 25 May 2007
Leal, S., Herrier, R.N., Glover, J.J., & Felix, A. (2004). Improving quality of care in
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.
... is an abstract model that proposes an exploratory plan for health services and evaluating quality of health care. In accordance with the model, information about quality of care can be obtained from three categories: structure, process, and outcomes. In addition, not long ago The Joint Commission include outcomes in its accreditation valuations (Sultz, & Young, 2011, p. 378).
In the healthcare system, quality is a major driving compartment for patient outcomes. The quality of care reflects the outcomes in a patient’s care. According to Feeley, Fly, Walters and Burke (2010), “quality equ...
Nembhard, I. M., Alexander, J. A., Hoff, T. J., & Ramanujam, R. (2009). Why Does the Quality of Health Care Continue to Lag? Insights from Management Research. Academy Of Management Perspectives, 23 (1), 24-42. doi: 10.5465/AMP.2009.37008001
Reforming the health care delivery system to progress the quality and value of care is indispensable to addressing the ever-increasing costs, poor quality, and increasing numbers of Americans without health insurance coverage. What is more, reforms should improve access to the right care at the right time in the right setting. They should keep people healthy and prevent common, preventable impediments of illnesses to the greatest extent possible. Thoughtfully assembled reforms would support greater access to health-improving care, in contrast to the current system, which encourages more tests, procedures, and treatments that are either
In today’s health care system, “quality” and “safety” are one in the same when it comes to patient care. As Florence Nightingale described our profession long ago, it takes work and vigilance to ensure we are doing the best we can to care for our patients. (Mitchell, 2008)
Kohn, L., Corrigan, J., & Donaldson, M. (1999). To err is human: building a safer health system. Committee on Quality of Health Care in America Institute of Medicine National Academy Press Washington, D.C.
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,
The health care is extremely important to society because without health care it would not be possible for individuals to remain healthy. The health care administers care, treats, and diagnoses millions of individual’s everyday from newborn to fatal illness patients. The health care consists of hospitals, outpatient care, doctors, employees, and nurses. Within the health care there are always changes occurring because of advance technology and without advance technology the health care would not be as successful as it is today. Technology has played a big role in the health care and will continue in the coming years with new methods and procedures of diagnosis and treatment to help safe lives of the American people. However, with plenty of advance technology the health care still manages to make an excessive amount of medical errors. Health care organizations face many issues and these issues have a negative impact on the health care system. There are different ways medical errors can occur within the health care. Medical errors are mistakes that are made by health care providers with no intention of harming patients. These errors rang from communication error, surgical error, manufacture error, diagnostic error, and wrong medication error. There are hundreds of thousands of patients that die every year due to medical error. With medical errors on the rise it has caused the United States to be the third leading cause of death. (Allen.M, 2013) Throughout the United States there are many issues the he...
It is shocking to know that every year 98000 patients die from medical errors that can be prevented(Kohn, L. T., Corrigan, J. M., & Donaldson, M. S. (Eds.), 2000). Medical errors are not a new issue in our healthcare system; these have been around for a long time. Hospitals have been trying to improve quality care and patients safety by implementing different strategies to prevent and reduce medical errors for past thirty years. Medical errors are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer in America (Allen, 2013). In addition medical errors are costing our healthcare system an estimated $735 billion to $980 billion (Andel, Davidow, Hollander, & Moreno, 2012).