Medical Errors And Its Effects On Healthcare

The Joint Commission focuses on certain goals each year. For patient safety and positive outcomes, hospitals are required to follow certain standards. National Patient Safety Goals were established in 2002 to help identify areas of concern with patient safety. This group is made up by a panel of experts including nurses, doctors, pharmacists and many other healthcare professionals. They advise the Joint Commission on how to address these different patient safety issues. Two goals to be discussed are improving the accuracy of patient identification and medication safety. To improve patient

The goal of this paper is to investigate the application of technology to reduce error in healthcare. The Institute of Medicine reports: to Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System in 1999, which estimates of more than a million injuries and 100,000 deaths attributable to medical errors annually. This numbers of deaths are errors that resulted from medical errors..

The main objective of healthcare professionals is to provide the best quality of patient care and the highest level of patient safety. To achieve that objective, there are many organizations that help improve the quality of care. One of the best examples is the Joint Commission. Unfortunately, the healthcare system is not free from total risks. In healthcare activities, there are possible errors, mistakes, near miss and adverse events. All of those negative events are preventable. But, it is clear that errors caused in healthcare result in thousands of deaths in the United States.

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).

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

In this task I will be describing how health and safety legislation, policies and procedures promotes the safety of individuals in a Hospital. Quality care is an important issue for both health care workers and their partners. Government continue to work on implementing staffing law that will upgrade the medical systems. Hospitals are required to provide security for patients and staff. Mechanical equipment, housekeeping, administrative and food staff play important roles in preventing all environmental hazards. Safety concerns surrounding these hazards include injury, illness, disease exposure, disaster

Patient safety is of major concern in healthcare settings due to the preventable nature of events that sometimes lead to serious injury, and even death, for patients. This was catapulted to the forefront of healthcare delivery in 1999 when the Institute of Medicine wrote a scathing report; To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, that highlighted "the lack of safety for patients in healthcare organizations" (Ulrich and Kear 2014). The National Patient Safety

Causes of major medical errors have many different factors and influences. This includes why the patient was being seen to allow such an error, what medical guideline or guideline’s that where not followed that caused the error, what could have been done by staff members to prevent the error, etc. When errors take place, repercussions follow such as the cost incurred to the patient or patient family members, fines the medical worker must pay, and most importantly what is the patients status/prognosis. Not all patients prevail and make it through such awful medical errors.

The policy is a very realistic approach to solve this problem because as more individuals are insured under the ACA and have access to healthcare, they will utilize health facilities and hospitals more frequently for services or procedures and hospitals will have increased occurrences of adverse outcomes, if this is not addressed. Patients are the consumers. They seek satisfaction and quality with services. Quality health care and patient safety should be important to the patients, hospitals, health facilities, physicians, nurses, pharmacists, risk managers, and medical professionals and staff. Medical staff may feel over burdened to comply with the necessary steps to ensure the improvement of patient safety, which may require additional training.

Each year medical errors cause more than 400,000 American deaths and at least 10-20 times that number experience serious harm. Researchers say that is equivalent to “three 747 airplanes crashing each day.” Medical errors rank as the third-leading cause of death in America. Therefore, patient safety is a national concern.

This article was selected as it explained and discussed the probable standardized procedure that health care organizations may have to follow for improvements in patient safety. This article explains how the inter-personal and professional relationship of different health care providers need to be maintained for better health care as explained in one of the chapters of health care management.

Section 2 of this report, Errors in Health Care: A Leading Cause of Death and Injury, surveys the writing on mistakes to evaluate current comprehension of the greatness of the issue and distinguishes various issues that hinder consideration regarding persistent security. A general absence of data on and attention to mistakes in human services by buyers and shoppers makes it unthinkable for them to request better care. The way of life of pharmaceutical make a desire of flawlessness and ascribes mistakes to lack of regard or inadequacy. Obligation concerns demoralize the surfacing of mistakes and correspondence about how to amend them. The absence of unequivocal and reliable models for understanding wellbeing makes holes in authorizing and accreditation

Chapter VIII emphasizes the importance of preventable medical mistakes in order to save lives. Once again, this chapter recommends to be knowledgeable of the seven rights such as right patient, right route, right drug, right dose, right time, right technique and right information. This chapter also talks about educating the patient about how to administer themselves the medication and how often. I think that medication errors will always be a big issue that health care worker will deal with; however, I’ve learned by taking enough precautions this type of mistakes can be minimized in the healthcare industry. According to a report done by ABC news, “1 in 3 patients will face a mistake during a hospital stay, they are finding out that is not

You've heard those hospital horror stories where the surgeon removes the wrong body part oroperates on the wrong patient or accidentally leaves medical equipment in the person they were operating on.

Issues related to a lack of patient safety have been going on for a lot of years now. Throughout the first decade of the 21st century, there has been a national emphasis on cultivating patient safety. Patient safety is a global issue, that touches countries at all levels of expansion and is one of the nation's most determined health care tests. According to the Institute of Medicine (1999), they have measured that as many as 48,000 to 88,000 people are dying in U.S. hospitals each year as the result of lapses in patient safety. Estimates of the size of the problem on this are scarce particularly in developing countries; it is likely that millions of patients worldwide could suffer disabling injuries or death every year due to unsafe medical care. Risk and safety have always been uninterruptedly been significant concerns in the hospital industry. Patient safety is a very much important part of our health care system and it really