Patient Safety Is Vital For The Practice Of Medicine

As a biomedical scientist working in a pathology laboratory, the work that is performed is vital for helping pathologists make a better diagnosis and find the right treatment for the patients. Discussions of patient diagnosis and treatments often take place with multi-disciplinary team meetings (MDT meetings); these consist of a group of professionals from one or more clinical disciplines, who together discuss the case of the patient and make formal decisions regarding the recommended treatment pathway. The specialist doctors, registrars, nurses, consultants, and coordinators who come from a range of other professional groups, will establish from any blood and tissue samples, x-rays and scans that the patient’s diagnosis has been made correctly and accurately. For this reason, the work of a biomedical scientist will indirectly have an impact on these professional groups and the healthcare of the patient. Biomedical scientist are therefore relied upon to produce accurate work in the laboratory pathway, as any tiny mistake may be critical for the outcome of these meetings, if they are not identified. Alongside this, the workflow that the biomedical scientists must maintain in the laboratory will affect these meetings if turn-around times are not met efficiently.

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

Patient safety is of utmost importance in healthcare. As healthcare providers we are all human, and therefore we all error, having a system that will double check our actions for said errors would be of great value. Technology in healthcare is developed with the intent to combat exactly that. The role of technology continues beyond the detection of human error and plays an overall significant part in keeping and maintaining patients’ safety.

The preanalytical errors increases health care costs and decreases the patient satisfaction. The laboratory errors that happen at any stage of the total testing process have influence on quality of laboratory services. Any errors that happen during this total testing process will affect the patient care that also includes unnecessary recollection of samples, delay in reporting, misdiagnosis and treatment by the clinician. Although the errors can happen at any stage of the total testing process, preanalytical errors accounts for highest percentage (70%). The consequences associated with analytical errors are significantly reduced by the use of modern laboratory instruments. But pre analytical phase is still prone to more errors due to its complexity and different stages that involved within and outside laboratory. The inaccurate reporting of results due to preanalytical errors leads to unnecessary investigations and creating an additional burden to the healthcare system (Kaushik, & Green, 2014). According to Green (2013) the healthcare economist created a model to quantify the costs associated with laboratory errors and poor sample quality. It is based on operating costs, number of beds, test volume, number of rejected samples, instrument problems and the frequency of inaccurate results reported by laboratory and their impacts. As per this model

In the article Medical Professionalism in the New Millennium, by Sox, the author’s focus was on the three fundamentals and ten professional responsibilities that are bestowed on medical professionals today. These are principles and guidelines that we, as medical professionals, should consider and adhere to daily while performing our duties. Although all the points made in the article are important there are a few that can be incorporated into the Medical Laboratory Scientist’s everyday performance. In my opinion, these principles are improving quality care, patient confidentiality, scientific knowledge, professional competence, and professional responsibilities. In addition, I would incorporate always having the patient’s best interest at

With the passage of Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) Act the patient would know that unsafe practices and poor quality within any laboratory will not be tolerated. CLIA rules for laboratory testing are more standardized because it outlines the expectations of laboratories. This passage would allow the patient and/or their personal representative access to his or her laboratory test reports and the results of such test from the laboratory. The patient would know that this amendment requires laboratories to implement policies and procedures relating to a patient request for information. Also, the patient would know that there must be a proper verification of identification before he or she has access to PHI. Any laboratory

In the 1966 film, Fantastic Voyage, world famous scientist Jan Benes suffers a stroke after being attacked on his way to the United State Combined Miniature Deterrent Forces (CMDF) lab. He possesses vital information that the US needs in order to defeat the Soviet Union, so they put Benes into a coma to prevent his brain from hurting itself further. Dr. Peter Duval, the lead surgeon, informs Mr. Benes’s Secret Service handler that the injured part of Benes’s brain is located in an area that they cannot operate on without fatally injuring the man. Their only option is to shrink an expert team of four engineers and scientists, along with Mr. Benes’s Secret Service handler, down to microscopic size and inject them through Jan Benes’s carotid artery

The safety of the patient is a worldwide issue and is not a single hospitals problem as noted by Aiken et al. (2012). According to Van Den Bos et al. (2011) some of the ways that patients could be harmed includes poor application of technology that is meant to reduce errors in health care. According to Tzeng et al., 2013 patients die unnecessarily year after year due to medical harm that can be prevented. The 2011 report by the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) revealed that over 98,000 of medical harm resulted in death which is about 38% of the fatalities related to medication errors (Classen et al., 2011).This has prompted the organizations and government Agencies such as Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to continually

Laboratory errors have a negative impact on the patient and the healthcare system. Errors result in wasted time, resources and supplies, decrease efficiency, and pose increased risk to the patient (Osborn, 2017). While there are three phases in the laboratory practice where lab errors can occur, pre-analytical, analytical, and post-analytical, the pre-analytical stage is where the majority of lab errors transpire (Hammerling, 2012). The pre-analytical phase is composed of many steps that occur both before and after the specimen reaches the laboratory (Kaushik & Green, 2014). The complexity to this phase contributes to the pre-analytical phase being the most error prone part of laboratory

Patient safety is a major concern for all health care providers. Two areas of safety that are relevant to my practice in an outpatient surgical center are medication errors and the electronic error reporting. The Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN) is the organization that was used to support my project. The Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) Initiative competency that was chosen for my indirect clinical project (ICP) was safety. Everyone in the health care environment wants to be kept safe. A discussion on how medication errors and the electronic error reporting affects everyone from the staff to the community will be discussed. Safety is an integral part of health care. Considering the Joint Commission (2015) believes patient safety is so important that it has dedicated and entire chapter on the subject and made it free to view. Throughout this paper safety related to medication errors and electronic error reporting will be discussed. Along with the topic of medication errors and electronic reporting will be two plans to reduce safety related events. Overall the paper will cover medication errors and their prevention with how electronic error reporting can help prevent frequent errors from occurring.

An analysis of patient safety in the health care industry reveals a multitude of challenges facing providers and patients alike. A new commitment to providing safe, quality health care to patients is a critical part of reforming the U.S. health care system. But to be effective, a new health care discipline (i.e. Patient Safety), needed to be established that would emphasize the reporting, analysis, and prevention of medical errors that lead to adverse health care events. In analyzing this growing health care issue, I found that measuring and improving patient safety is complicated by many factors. We’ll examine a few of them in hopes of gaining a better understanding of the issues preventing the health care industry from resolving

In the health care system, patients put their trust and confidence in the hands of qualified medical professionals to properly handle all of their needs. Patient safety is an area that will continue to be explored and evaluated for improvement. In any clinical setting, it is imperative that proper diagnosis followed by an effective treatment plan is executed in a manner consistent with reducing the chance of mistakes being made. In the perioperative clinical environment the patient usually cannot speak for themselves due to being sedated. Therefore it is critically important to have a process in place to lessen or eliminated the possibility of performing the wrong surgery on the patient. The National patient safety

The topic of nurse to patient ratios has remained a consistent focus of controversy in the medical community. Nurses, physicians, patients, CEO’s and countless other individuals, have questioned the growing concern with patient safety and patient outcomes. Laying at the root of this concern, is the ever growing unease for patient safety based on the number of patients a nurse cares for during one shift. Hinno (2011) states “Knowledge of the relationship between nurse staffing and adverse patient outcomes is crucial to optimize the management of professional nursing resources and patient care.” (p. 1584) What are the outcomes for patients who are being cared for by an over loaded nurse? There appears to be a plethora of

To ensure good lab practice and quality of service communication with organisations that assess labs is very important as they embody a set of principles which provide a framework for labs which must be planned, performed, monitored, reported and archived. The aim of organizations such as this is to ensure that the data submitted by labs

Diagnostic laboratory testing has been steadily increasing over time in many medical settings all over the world. Hence, proper laboratory testing is crucial for better patient health(van Walraven & Naylor, 1998). Laboratory testing of patients can be inappropriate, and mostly it is repetitive testing(Neilson, 2004). The integrated HIS itself can also be a factor in encouraging repetitive examination, it can be based on different factors such as, when there is a disconnect between the HIS workflow and the physician’s workflow, test ordered in another department may not be shown in another department, tests taken by the patient at a different location of the same hospital group, patient recently taking the test in a different hospital group(Koppel & Ross,