Health Policy For Safe Patient Care

Anderson, J., Malone, L., Shanahan, K., & Manning, J. (2015). Nursing bedside clinical handover - an integrated review of issues and tools. Journal Of Clinical Nursing, 24(5/6), 662-671. doi:10.1111/jocn.12706.

Patient safety is of utmost importance to prevent errors and adverse effects associated with patients in health care. Yet, 44,000 to 90,000 people die each year from preventable medical errors (Potter & Peter) caused by human factors. According to World Health Organization (2009) human factors is defined as:

Los Angeles, Doctor and founder John McLaughlin, came up with the idea to reduce health care costs and improve patient safety

The National Patient Safety Goals were created in response to the IOM article, To Err is Human: Building Safer Health Systems. These goals were written to address patient safety and are tailored depending on the health care setting to which they are written for. They address system wide solutions rather than focusing on whom or how the error was made. Medical errors have been noted as being the 8th leading cause of death in the U.S. with the most frequent of these errors being medication related (Johnson, K., Bryant, C., Jenkins, M., Hiteshew, C., & Sobol, K. 2010). Therefore a great focus on these goals is needed across the health care continuum. The goals are updated and amended on a regular basis using evidence-based research, in response to areas with high errors in patient safety.

The standard of bedside clinical handover is including patients and family in the process transfer patient’s critical information from the outgoing nurses to the next oncoming nurses at the end of shift exchange. Literature show patients play a vital role in handoff report. Patients provide input and verify inaccurate information to make a safe transition report (Lu et al. 2013). However, bedside clinical handover is not well established or persistent practice in many hospitals. Nurses provide handoff at the nurse’s station or in the hallways, often causing patients’ vital information to be lost, which contributes to medical malpractice, patients’ injuries or death (Lu et al. 2013). Using descriptive qualitative research to explore patients’ perceptive in bedside nursing handover, the study included thirty patients in three different hospital wards. The Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is used to analyze the data (Lu et al. 2013). Overall, results found nurses continue applying bedside clinical handover practice to enhance patient-family centered care. Patients felt

This paper will discuss the National Patient Safety Goal NPSG 0.7.06.01 entitled “ Use proven guidelines to prevent infection of the urinary tract that are caused by catheter” (The Joint Commission, 2015). It will identify reasons why this National Patient Safety Goal was chosen as well as the type of organizations that utilize urinary catheters. It will look into the cost of implementing an educational process compared with the hospital cost of Catheter-Associated Urinary Infections (CAUTI). The Advanced Practice Nurse (APN) will demonstrate a method on how to gather data, design educational tool, implement standard practice and create a committee by collaborating with other health care disciplines. The effectiveness of the educational process will be evaluated through data collection and analysis. Finally, future health care delivery implications will be explored.

Patient safety is a primary goal for all health care workers, especially Registered Nurses who are the primary care givers for many patients. To promote safety and well-being it is important to provide the best possible care to all patients without spreading hospital acquired infections to patients that were previously free from certain diseases. Clostridium difficile infections (CDI) are a common occurrence within health care settings and can cause many complications, increasing length of stay, and could even cause death.

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.

The benefit of standardized handoff reporting. Research shows the implementation of any standardized reporting format will improve communication between health care providers by reducing the risk of transferring inaccurate and incomplete patient information (Barry, 2014). In a study by Guilbeault et al. (2015), both verbal and non-verbal handoffs have been shown to reduce communication errors. While there is little information regarding an electronic handoff, it is expected to reduce the loss of information (Guilbeault, Momtahan, & Hudson, 2015). According to Braun (2012), allowing the electronic medical record to gather the information from multiple sources will reduce the time the nurse will spend gathering information and standardize the process (Braun, 2012). Despite the need for a standardized tool, a common format has yet to be accepted (Matney, Maddox, & Staggers, 2014).

The National Patient Safety Goals are intended to assess the safety and quality of care provided to patients/residents. Of the programs created to provide quality patient care, two are in relation to this particular case, Nursing Care Center and Home Care.1

Some gaps that have been identified in the transition of care include lack of formal handoff training, undocumented care, and communication errors. According to Malekzadeh et al., (2013) shift handoffs are not formally taught to student nurses as part of their education, instead these skills are learned on the job. Therefore, deficiency in training can impact the communication and content delivered by the healthcare team resulting in the loss of information. At the same time, another gap identified in handoff reporting is

In order to provide the best possible care for the patients in their care nurses should determine the most effective and accurate handover. Therefore, Analizing the level of data retained or lost from employing different handover methods is crucial.

Patient safety is the top priority because health situation may change within few minutes depending on severity of the case. In this incident, physical injury has not taken place but the potentiality of injury is extremely high and there is a narrow space between the risk and injury. I have determined that next time i will give my first priority for safety measures no matter what area it is. In clinical practices, if my errors harm the resident, it is personally, ethically and professionally objectionable. I have learnt to place the bed to the lowest level and raise the side rails before I leave the resident’s room. Safety is resident’s right .Safety comes everywhere as priority and careful handling the elderly population is one of the higher

Looking at the current organization, I can attest on everyone’s effort to adhere to the six aims of the Institute of Medicine. For nurses, it is vital for them to understand these as nurses will be the key players to meeting these quality standards. One important key player, I have read was the inclusion of patients and families in participating in safety promotion. I can agree on this since advanced technology affords the community to be more informed about health issues. In fact, patients can now access their records and communicate with their providers through telemedicine. Hence, nurses should engage them in implementing safety measures as well. As nurses continue to experience being shorthanded at work, maintaining patient

(2010) discussed strategies to prevent AEs were quality assurance/peer review where there is continuous monitoring of data quality based on pre-specified standards and assessment of a health professional’s performance by one or more individuals working in the same field, evaluation of safety behaviour, training or re training for skills needed and completing or improving formal and informal procedures. NSW Health ED Clinical Initiatives Nurse Roles (2010) has outlined strategies for communication for patient and carers. They discussed that regular contact with patients and carers in the waiting room can assist greatly in getting the ED visit off on the right foot’, relieves anxiety and engages people to work with each other. They have made mnemonics A-E as strategy for successful communication accompanied with regular interaction with patients and carers. This includes, acknowledgement of patients presence, be yourself, communicate the plan, duration and timeframe of stay in ED, explore their needs. Varkey and Antonio (2010) states that communication is integral to the success of change management; however, it is underused in most organizations. Effective communication empowers participants to take part in the creation of the change process, as well as to contribute to its evolution and adoption. Individuals who will be directly affected by the changes often can provide valuable job-specific insight from experience to aid in the creation of the