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Patient Safety Definition

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To Do No Harm the Focus of Safety
Angela Zielinski
Baker School of Nursing

To Do No Harm the Focus of Safety
In 1852 Florence Nightingale wrote “It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a hospital that it should do the sick no harm”. The goal of any medical facility should be that no preventable harm should befall the patient. Though this may seem to be an obvious goal, this very goal took second place to medical and scientific advances. In 2000, the article To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System published by the Institute of Medicine, drew attention back to what had once been a foundational goal of patient safety when in the care of the health system. Today, preventable medical …show more content…

The article stresses that in order to maintain a culture of safety, nurses and caregivers must be encouraged to report medical errors, near misses or adverse events without fear of retaliation. The agreement of a need of culture of safety in which nurses can be accountable without punishment is further addressed in an article by Battie, Steelman (2014) entitled Accountability in Nursing Practice: Why it is Important for Patient Safety, stresses that it is important that when a nurse is aware of a breach in patient safety that she needs to draw attention to the breach regardless of who or what caused it in order to prevent patient harm. This draws attention to a need for open communication and for understand that accountability need not be a venue for …show more content…

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