The Biomedical Excellence For Safer Transfusion

In providing a safe and effective environment for a patient, it is important the nurse follow the National Patient Safety goals and implement them in their daily routine. These goals were developed by the Joint Commission’s Patient Safety Advisory group which consists of physicians, nurses, risk managers, pharmacists and other professionals involved in care giving. These goals are put into effect “to assist accredited organizations to address specific areas of concern in regards to patient safety” (TJC, 2015). One of the first goals is to correctly identify patients, which should be done for each patient before any procedure that involves the patient or anytime they are receiving medication or blood products. Identifying the patient should be done by using 2 identifiers which would be name and date of birth. This is used to help prevent a medication or procedure being given or done on the wrong patient. As a nurse it is critical to report severe or life altering lab tests or situations right away to the right person, which is another patient safety goal. Medications are given frequently in the hospital so a goal is for each medication to be given safely and correctly. This can be done according to the National Patient Safety Goals by monitoring patients closely who are taking blood thinners, making sure that

This unit is aimed at health and social care professionals involved in the use of

But nobody ever set any parameters on what to do if the hemoglobin ranged between 7 and 10. This left the physician to decide when to start a blood transfusion. The Johns Hopkins study revealed that because of this most physicians always erred in the side of “safety” by ordering a transfusion any time the hemoglobin was at or below 10.

I have chosen the Hospital National Patient Safety Goals. One goal is improve the accuracy of patient identification. The Joint Commission wants hospitals to use at least two patient identifiers when providing care, treatment, and services. I believe that the person, who is checking in the patient, needs to be made aware of the importance of this process. One way would be to request two pieces of personal identification. Fraud is happening everywhere and requesting two pieces of identification might make this less likely to happen. Every person that comes in contact with the patient needs to check their identification bracelet with the medical record, orders and prescriptions. The HIM professional manages the master patient index and must

After reviewing the 2014 Patient Safety Goals, the one that drawn my attention the most, is the Patient Identification goal. The article that I chose is Patient Safety Solutions. This article was written back in May 2007. This article is about the failure to identified patients correctly and the consequences that occur as a results. Some of the bad outcomes as a result of such failures include, patients received wrong blood transfusion, laboratory received wrong blood for different patients. There were wrong patients being operated on, and patients were given wrong medications.

I will explain each right in detail to you. “The right patient”. To make sure that you are administering medication to the right patient you have to verify two different types of identification.

If I were to walk down the hallway and hear a fellow nurse making the statement that they are trying to administer medication, and the cannot complete the task because the medication administration program is telling them wrong patient my first action would be to ask that nurse if I could assist her is finding a solution. Hopefully that nurse would allow me to assist. Then I would be able to check the chart and the patient’s identification band manually. If it was not the correct due to patients having similar names such as James Stewart or Stewart James, then the problem would be easily solved by selecting the correct patient’s chart. However, if the patient’s identification bracelet is correct and matches the selected patient’s HER, then

A third risk in a hospital is medication errors. These occur when either the pharmacist can’t read a physician’s hand writing on a prescription, or the physician does not know the patients medication history and so on. The quality outcome of the patient’s wellbeing is affected in this risk.

There is a major concern about patient safety; not only here in the United States, but in many countries around the world. Medical errors can happen to unfortunately anyone and clearly they happen all the time around the world. There has been quite a few studies done in order to pin point some of the risk factors of medical errors and some of them had unsettling conclusions.

According to the “Hospital National Patients Safety Goals”, it puts the “Identify patients correctly” in the top one place instead of preventing patient falls. In the article, it also requires healthcare staff use at least two ways to identify the patient. Because a mismatched patient can cause serious consequences in any stage of the diagnosis and treatment, such as diagnostic testing errors, transfusion errors and wrong-site procedures, etc. Especially

Determining what blood type a person has is very important. It is important because if one were to lose a great deal of blood in say, a car crash, the doctors would need to give him or her a blood transfusion. In order to give one a blood transfusion, the doctors would need to know him or her blood type. Blood types are determined by the agglutinogens, located in the red blood cells and the agglutinin, located in the blood plasma. For example, if a person is blood type A they have A agglutinogens and B agglutinin. If one were to have Blood type O, he or she would have neither B nor A agglutinogens and both A and B agglutinin. If a doctor gave someone the wrong blood type, that person’s immune system would attack and destroy the new blood that was transfused. This can cause an acute hemolytic transfusion reaction which can be fatal.

Observations should be undertaken and documented for every unit transfused. Good record keeping is an integral part of nursing practice and is essential to the provision of safe and effective care. The nurse should ensure that the patient is in a setting where they can be directly observed and where staff are trained in the administration of blood components and the management of transfused patients, including emergency treatment of anaphylaxis, she/he should advise and encourage the patient to notify her/him immediately if they begin to feel anxious, or if they feel any adverse reactions such as shivering, flushing, pain or shortness of breath, (Hebert, Wells, Blajchman, Marshall, Martin& Pagliarello, 2012

Patient safety is an essential component of hospital environments that has generated international debates and received many interpretations. It involves practices that seek to reduce risks and unnecessary health-related medication errors to an acceptable minimum (Silva & Camerini, 2012). Nurses’ role in the medication process includes administering drugs. This role exposes them to the possibility of making errors that can potentially harm the patient, or even result in death. The research articles authored by Westbrook et al. (2011) entitled “Errors in the Administration of Intravenous Medications in Hospital and the Role of Correct Procedures and Nurse Experience” and Ding et al. (2015) titled “Incidence of Intravenous Medication Errors

As good practice recommended by SaBTO (2011), Patient X and two nurses had to confirm that the blood received was tested and prepared for her. Norfolk, (2013) recommends that its good practice for two nurses to verify ABO and Rh compatibility, patient’s name, hospital ID number, and the number on the red (if patient has allergies) or white bracelet. Patient confirmed her details verbally and had to match with details on the tag of the donor blood bag, patient’s wristband and prescription chart. Details on the RBC bag include: Name of patient, Medical Record Number, Blood Group – Patient and Product, Expiry Date and Time and Product No. of Blood. The rationale of the practice is ensure to that the right blood is transfused to the right patient.

I agree with your post on two patient identifiers is very important to eliminate frequent errors that occurs in health care organizations. In addition to the goals of using two patient identification method as you mentioned. The goal for using this method is to avoid common diagnostic test performed on wrong patient errors, given medication to the wrong patient, and lab test performed to the wrong patient All these errors are harmful and serious because it could lead to patient harm or