Patient Safety In Health Care

An error is one of the vital parts of human life. Hospitals are areas with very chaotic systems and as health care is growing more steadily, it is becoming complex in nature and more sophisticated technologically. Therefore, medical errors are bound to happen. Administrators, physicians, and nurses, are advocates of patient safety and safety is one of the highest priorities during the provision of care. A report from Institute of Medicine (IOM) claims that between 44,000 and 98,000 die annually due to medical errors (Alexander, Cheryl Ann 2014). Medication errors can lead to adverse outcomes such as increased mortality, extended period of hospitalization, and amplified medical expenses. Although the health care team can cause medication errors, nursing medication errors are the most common. Moreover the workload of the nurses combined with more prescription

Patient safety is of high importance in the healthcare field. Medication errors are still of great concern in the healthcare setting. These errors are only one of many safety concerns. Medication errors occur often enough to be problematic, causing researchers to try to find the problem and come up with a solution. This error is a massive problem when a big part of nursing is delivering medications to patients. A health facility is thought to be a safe environment, when incidents like medication errors

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

One of the standards that has been implemented is Standard 4: Medication Safety. The Australian Commission implemented this standard with the intention of ensuring that competent clinicians safely prescribe, dispense and administer appropriate medicines to informed patients and monitor the effect. (Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, 2012) In healthcare, one of the most common treatments is medication. As a result of this, there are many incidences of error, many more than any other healthcare interventions. According to the Patient Safety Network (PS Network, 2015) medication errors account for nearly 700,000 emergency department visits and 100,000 hospitalizations each year. Medication errors are often a result of the unsafe and poor quality practice of healthcare professionals or system errors. Medication errors are costly and many are avoidable. For this standard

Researchers have identified that hospitalized patients are subject to one medication administration error per day, implying that approximately 1.5 million preventable drug event arise yearly in the United State. Medication errors are among the most common medical error, costing more than 3.5 billion

In 1999, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) “Too Err is Human” estimated 98,000 deaths yearly due to medical error. Many of the errors are the result of adverse drug events, most of which occur during the prescribing and administration stages of medication administration (Guo, Iribarren, Kapsandoy, Perri, and Staggers, 2011). These errors are a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in hospitalized patients. One report estimates that when all types of errors are accounted for, every hospitalized patient can expect on average one type of medication error per day and during 2006, adverse drug events resulted in approximately 400,000 cases of error at a cost of over $3.5 billion (pp. 202-224). Studies have demonstrated a

The IOM report To Err is Human (2000), categorized various types of errors based on the research of Leape, Woods & Hatlie,. (1993). The research conducted by Leape, et al. (1993) reveals that 70% of errors were preventable. Despite the ideal desire to be perfect healthcare professionals, we are all human; and no one is perfect. The primary focus in terms of medication errors is prevention, however the

The incidents of medication errors are complex, and variety of factors including human error, organizational or systems factors, slips and lapses, deviations from safe practice, workload factors, communication, knowledge deficits, environmental or worksite issues, inter-professional issues and concerns, and others contribute to errors (McKeon, Fogarty & Hegney, 2006: Lawton, Carruthers, Gardner, Wright & McEachan, 2012; Fasolino & Synder, 2012; Keers, Williams, Unver, Tastan & Akbayrak, 2012; Cooke, & Ashcroft, 2013; Shahrokhi, Ebrahimpour & Ghodous, 2013; Donaldson, Aydin, Fridman, & Foley, 2014; Karavasiliadou & Athanasakis, 2014; Niemann, Bertsche, Meyrath, Koepf, Traiser, et al., 2015; Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2015; Parry, et al., 2015; Norman, Monteiro, Sherbino, Ilgen, Schmidt &

Patient safety is defined as the prevention of harm to patients, and is the number one priority in healthcare facilities. All healthcare facilities have policies in place to keep patients as safe as possible. These policies can include anything from preventing infection to education. Every facility will have different policies in place, thus all patient safety policies will emphasize a culture of safety in a suitable environment. One policy that is of concern is the minimum number of nurses staffed on a unit at any given time, or the nurse to patient ratio. Every state and every

Medication errors have always been a problem; even today they still loom about health care facilities such as hospitals and assisted living homes. A medication error is as an error in the process of providing care for a patient that has potential to harm the patient. There also many different ways those medication errors can occur, prescription, preparation, distribution, transcription, administration and monitoring. “It has been estimated by the Institute of Medicine that medication errors cause 1 of 131 outpatient and 1 of 854 inpatient deaths,” (Wittich et al, 2013). Of those different ways medication errors can happen, all of them have multiple factors that go into them that can cause an error to occur. Medication errors cause many

Hi Mary. I agree, there is a need for increased fall education and patient safety awareness of staff. Nurses play a key role in patient safety. I believe that being a nurse is a constant evolution, we evolve as we practice. Nursing will never be stagnant and we see every day that nursing research helps to bring forth more effective nursing care. It is vital to emphasize the clinical nursing research to guide nursing practice and to improve the health and quality of life of our patients (Polit and Beck, 2012). Hospitalization increases fall risk because of unfamiliar environment, illnesses, and treatment. Patient falls and fall-related injuries are devastating to patients, clinicians, and the health care team. A single fall may result in a fear

Patient Safety is a primary goal in the healthcare industry. The increase in incidents of medication, diagnostic errors, falls, hospital acquired infections, pressure ulcers and poor communication exchanges, as well as nursing shortages, has attributed to the lack of patient safety. These incidents in safety have occurred in hospitals, primary care, and long term care facilities. Recent finding in patient safety issues indicate that most of these problems continue to exist. By decreasing the chance of further incidents through CQI methodologies, patients can have increase chances of higher quality of care, and healthier outcomes.

As the health care industry continues to grow rapidly and patient’s diagnosis is becoming more complex, providing safe, reliable care have never been all the more difficult. Medications, depending on its utilization can cause desired therapeutic effects as well as harmful effects to one’s health, especially when error is committed. Medication error is an on growing issue that continues to affect the quality of patient care. And the need for better error avoidance strategies or medication management practice and administration system is becoming crystal clear as the number of medication errors are increasing daily in the health care industry.

Medication error is one of the biggest problems in the healthcare field. Patients are dying due to wrong drug or dosage. Medication error is any preventable incident that leads to inappropriate medication use or harms the patient while the medication is in the control of the health care professional,or patient (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2015). It is estimated about 44,000 inpatients die each year in the United States due to medication errors which were indeed preventable (Mahmood, Chaudhury, Gaumont & Rust, 2012). There are many factors that contribute to medication error. However, the most common that factors are human factors, right patient information, miscommunication of abbreviations, wrong dosage. Healthcare providers do not intend to make medication errors, but they happen anyways. Therefore, nursing should play a tremendous role to reduce medication error

The National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA 2010), defines a drug error as ‘any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate use of patient harm. Although not all drug errors have lead to patient harm it is important to recognise that if a mistakes has been