Patient Safety

As health care has advanced through the years, many roles have changed which includes those of risk management and patient safety. Once thought to be one in the same,but they have distinct and obvious differences that set each apart from the other. Risk management is defined very broadly by the United States Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services as "any activities,process, or policy to reduce liability exposure"(https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-01-03-00050.pdf).This is much different from the definition of patient safety as found in the book Advances in Patient Safety: New Directions and Alternative Approaches as "Patient safety is a discipline in the health care sector that applies safety science methods

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:

One of the most critical factors which contribute to the number of preventable cases of healthcare harm is the culture of silence surrounding these cases. The fear of medical providers to report incidences is related to the possibility of punishment and liability due to a medical error (Discovery, 2010). The criminalization of some acts of medical error has resulted in job dismissal, criminal charges and jail time for some healthcare workers. This is despite the fact that the system they are working in helped to create the situation which led to the error in the first place. Human error, due to fatigue and system errors can result in deadly consequences, but by criminalizing the error it effectively shuts down the ability to correct the root problem. Healthcare workers, working at all levels within the medical system, can provide valuable input on how to improve the processes and prevent harm from occurring (Discovery, 2010).

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.

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.

It is critical in today’s health care field to avoid harm and ensure that patient safety in health care environment, especially with the attention of medical mistakes little is known about the importance of avoidable harm to public. The mistakes that happen in the healthcare setting are rarely the fault of individual workers, but usually the result of problems within the system that they work.

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 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.

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 financial implications of implementing educational process versus the hospital cost of Catheter-Associated Urinary Infections (CAUTI). The Advanced Practice Nurse (APN) will demonstrate method on how to gather data, design educational tool, implement standard practice and create a committee by collaborating with other health care discipline. Effectiveness of the educational process will be evaluated through data collection. Finally, future health care delivery implications will be explored.

It is a great opportunity to have this experience and to relate it with what we were being taught at school. There are a lot of connections in this project regarding patient safety. My safety project is a qualitative analysis of the difference between an allergy and sensitivity. The question still lies on how could the hospital staff manage allergy better?

shown that receiving medical care is risky (Weeks & Bagian, 2000). Thousands of people die or

In our nursing practice, the nurse is required to hold essential skills of clinical judgment and be a patient advocate to ensure the safety and the well-being of the patient we care for. Patient safety can be compromised if nurses are not able to identify potential issues thru assessment of the patient's sign and symptoms. Patient safety can also be compromised if nurses are afraid to speak up for our patient and question what we think or feel are unsafe acts or orders.

Canada 's health care framework is intended to verify that all Canadians subjects have admittance to primary and other fundamental health administrations. It is basically a publicly financed protection framework regulated on a provincial or regional level. The Canada Health Act set by the national government guarantees a high caliber of consideration and denies doctors from charging patients for services officially administered by the legislature. Lately, the Canadian Health Industry has been anticipated as the most noticeably awful run industry in Canada. Canada’s healthcare system, Medicare, is in a crisis which is boosted by high costs, inconsistent quality, and inaccessibility to essential services. By 2011, 50% of all government spending was expected to be spent on healthcare in Ontario. Canada is ranked 5th internationally, for its per capita spending on healthcare (OECD, 2009). While the financial burden of providing healthcare to Canadians has increased 5.5% from 2008 to 2009, so do have the challenges associated with providing timely access to services for those in need . Unfortunately high waiting times have become a significant factor in restricting access to care for Canadians, especially in the emergency departments (CIHI, 2007).

Patient safety should be the number one goal for all healthcare workers. The Joint Commission has established National Patient Safety goals with recommended guidelines for use. Medical offices such as Curative Health have a responsibility to their patients to conform to these guidelines to prevent medical errors. Mary was fortunate that the wrong procedure performed on her caused no harm. Clear processes to identify patients and correctness of procedures should be established in the offices of Curative Health before to prevent future, possibly harmful,

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