The Importance Of Safety And Quality Care

Mulloy, D. F., & Hughes, R. G. (2008). Patient safety & quality: an evidence-based handbook for nurses. Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Retrieved from http://www.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2678/

In the United States alone there are 98,000 deaths per year caused by low quality health care (Ignatavicius & Workman, 2013, pg. 2). This statistic is disturbing because the errors that resulted in death were errors that were preventable. The intent of this chapter is to bring awareness to health care providers that are able to make a change in the quality of health care. In current practice patients are subjected to medication errors, preventable hospitalizations, premature death, and poor care provided due to racial, ethical, or low-income factors.

The main objective of healthcare professionals is to provide the best quality of patient care and the highest level of patient safety. To achieve that objective, there are many organizations that help improve the quality of care. One of the best examples is the Joint Commission. Unfortunately, the healthcare system is not free from total risks. In healthcare activities, there are possible errors, mistakes, near miss and adverse events. All of those negative events are preventable. But, it is clear that errors caused in healthcare result in thousands of deaths in the United States.

Over time the health care industry has become more complex. Health care is rapidly evolving and continuing to complicate our delivery of care, which in turn has the same effect on quality of care. This steady evolution and change results in nursing shortages and an increase in the prevalence of errors being made. In hopes of preventing these errors and creating safe and high quality patient care, with the focus on new and improved ways of thinking, The Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) initiative was developed. The QSEN focuses on the following competencies: patient-centered care, quality improvement, safety, and teamwork and collaboration. Their initiatives work to prepare and develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are necessary to make improvements in the quality and safety of health care systems (Qsen.org, 2014).

Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) was developed with the purpose of providing professional nurses with the knowledge, skills and attitudes (KSA) necessary to continuously improve the quality and safety of the health care systems within which they work (QSEN, 2014). However, since its implementation and integration in nursing education, studies show little progress in improving quality and safety in health care delivery (Dolansky & Moore, 2013). The purpose of this article critique is to evaluate the cause analysis and recommendations made by the authors.

In this task I will be describing how health and safety legislation, policies and procedures promotes the safety of individuals in a Hospital. Quality care is an important issue for both health care workers and their partners. Government continue to work on implementing staffing law that will upgrade the medical systems. Hospitals are required to provide security for patients and staff. Mechanical equipment, housekeeping, administrative and food staff play important roles in preventing all environmental hazards. Safety concerns surrounding these hazards include injury, illness, disease exposure, disaster

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how safety in the nursing profession affects the nursing education, nursing practice, and nursing research. Safety in the nursing profession means to minimize the risk of harm to patients and providers through both system effectiveness and individual performances (QSEN, 2014). Patient safety is a very important aspect in the profession of nursing. It is the nurse’s job to keep up to date with their patients and to make sure that protocol is being followed at all times. To maintain this strategy, the nurse must show proper knowledge of a nurse, skills of a nurse, and also a professional attitude.

Quality improvement is defined by Kelly (2012) as “a systematic process of organization wide participation and partnership in planning and implementing continuous improvement methods to understand, meet, or exceed customer needs and expectations and improve patient outcomes” (p.477). The women’ unit can receive thirty patients from age eighteen to late adulthood. The unit is a receiving facility for everyone Baker acted in the state of Florida. Like any other organization, change is always happening in the women’s unit. One of the areas that need improvement on the unit is a reduction in the number of seclusion and restraint that we do every month. Patients that are violent and present a danger to either

The Quality and Safety for Nurses (QSEN) project, developed in 2005 from recommendations made by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), addresses issues pertaining to how to better prepare future nurses with knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSAs) to continue to improve the safety and quality of care provided by the healthcare organizations in which they work (Billings & Halstead, 2016; QSEN, n.d.). The mission of QSEN emphases the collaboration of all healthcare professionals focusing on education, practice, and scholarship to improve the healthcare system. With the partnerships of national nursing organizations and schools of nursing, QSEN has been developed from IOM reports and integrated into pre-licensure and graduate student’s

Over the last several years, a wide variety of health care organizations have been facing a number of challenges. This is because of pressures associated with: rising costs, increasing demands and larger numbers of patients. For many facilities this has created a situation where patient safety issues are often overlooked. This is because the staff is facing tremendous amounts of pressure, long hours and more patients. The combination of these factors has created a situation where a variety of hospitals need to improve their patient safety procedures. In the case of Sharp Memorial Hospital, they are focused on addressing these issues through different strategies. To fully understand how they are able to achieve these objectives requires looking at: specific ways the organization has responded to the crisis in medical errors, their definition of patient safety, the causes of errors, systematic barriers and transformations that have been adopted. Together, these different elements will provide the greatest insights as to how the facility is coping with the crisis in patient safety.

Patient safety and quality of care are vital outcomes in the healthcare system. As professionals dealing with human lives, we consider these topics as core to our practice. In 2005, the Quality and Safety Education (QSEN) project was created in response to the challenges recognized in preparing nurses with the knowledge, skills, and attitude (KSAs) essential in providing safe and high-quality care to every patient (QSEN, 2012). This QSEN collaboration was the product of the strategies developed by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) report Crossing the Quality Chasm in 2001 and Health Professions Education: A Bridge to Quality in 2003 (Armstrong, G. & Barton, J., 2014). There were six competencies identified in the QSEN curriculum that includes patient-centered care, teamwork and collaboration, evidence-based practice, quality improvement, informatics, and safety. In this paper, the QSEN competency, evidence-based practice will be discussed in relation to achieving quality and safety to the nursing process.

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.

Errors pervade in our lives whether it is our home, in our workplace, or in our society. The effects of healthcare errors have impacted all our lives either directly or indirectly. Patient safety and quality care are at the core of healthcare system which strongly depends upon nurses. “To achieve goals in patient safety and quality, thereby improve healthcare, nurses must assume the leadership role. Nurses need to ensure that they and other healthcare providers center healthcare on patients and their families. Even though the quality and safety of healthcare is heavily influenced by the complex nature

In today’s health care system, “quality” and “safety” are one in the same when it comes to patient care. As Florence Nightingale described our profession long ago, it takes work and vigilance to ensure we are doing the best we can to care for our patients. (Mitchell, 2008)

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