We Are No Harm The Focus Of Safety

Keeping our hands clean is one of the most effcient and important steps we can do as humans to avoid getting sick or spreading germs to other people. Unwashed hands spread many diseases such as the flue, E. coli, and salmonella. Unfortunately, hand hygiene is still one of today’s most leading causes of infection in health care facilities. The risk of clinicians, patients, and visitors not complying with hand hygiene protocols creates a practice problem for nurses and their patient care. The cause of health care infections, also known as, health care-associated infections (HAIs) are increasing along with the rise of the inability to control or treat infections that are multi-drug resistant. Lack of proper hand hygiene is a major problem in clinical settings sourcing from critical care divisions where the most contaminations are prevalent. This paper will discuss how hand hygiene affects the nursing process and solutions of how to better prevent HAIs within the nursing scope of practice.

This study was intended to prove that hand hygiene practiced according to the CDC guidelines will decrease the incidence of hospital acquired infections. This could not really be proved in this study since the hospitals were not able to maintain improvement in hand hygiene. Health care workers were familiar with guidelines but significant practice changes were not maintained. Some of the infection rates did improve during this time but the correlation with hand hygiene is not consistent. There were other practice changes occurring during this same time and those changes may be responsible for the decreased infection rates.

CDCs clean hands count campaign aim to improve healthcare provide adherence to hand hygiene recommendations, address, myths and misperceptions about hand hygiene and empower patients to play a role in their care by asking or reminding healthcare providers to clean their hands and the most germs that cause serious infections in healthcare are spread by people’s action, every patient is at risk of getting an infection while they are being treated for something else, hand hygiene is a great way to prevent infections and healthcare providers clean their hands less than half of the time they should, good hand washing is the first line of defense against the spread of many illness.

Some errors affects patient minimally, whereas other medication errors results in patient morbidity and mortality. Despite the efforts, medication errors remains problematic in the area of healthcare. It is the health care organizations biggest challenge. Numerous research has been done to identify factors that would reduce medication error, however the emphasis on error management has been minimally to nonexistent (Admi, et al., 2013).

Prevention strategies of nosocomial infections related to poor hand hygiene include revision of: orientation, training processes, competency assessments, equipment cleaning, handwashing procedures, switching to the use of single-use IV flush vials, adding strategically located waterless hand rubs, defining supervisory expectations, conducting in-services, team trainings, and tracking systems (Infection control related sentinel events, 2003). Potential solutions to noncompliance include: consistent skin protectant application, reduced time required for handwashing, and antiseptic stations at the bedside and room entry points (Boyce, 1999). Hospital administrators must create an organizational atmosphere in which adherence to recommended HH practices are considered an integral part of providing high-quality care (Boyce, 1999). Improvement in infection control

The Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) (1999) report To Err is Human revealed the United States healthcare system to be a rather unsafe environment for patients estimating that as many as 96,000 patients died or were seriously injured due to preventable medical errors. Incidentally, studies conducted as recently as 2011 have suggested that the actual rate of preventable medical error occurrence may be three times the IOM’s initial estimation (Andel, Davidow, Hollander, & Moreno, 2012). Statistics this extreme cannot be attributed to the mistakes or substandard practices of individual healthcare providers alone and thus it is imperative that healthcare organizations begin to seek out solutions at the system’s level (Geary, 2014). Therefore, it

Mistakes are made in the healthcare field every day and there are a few ways that this can be prevented. We are going to discuss different ways to decrease the chances of errors for the safety of our patients. Every facility has or should have, somewhere in the building, a copy of the national patient safety goals and it is important that you know what they are and where to find them. As we navigate through the goals that are to be discussed, we will touch on a few that are very important from reducing the risk of healthcare associated infections to improving the accuracy of resident identification. With all this in mind we can greatly reduce the risk we put or patients in every day.

One the main roles healthcare workers (HCWs) can do is to provide patients with a safe environment whilst they are in the healthcare setting. In providing clinical safety to patients HCWs are ensuring that the patient will be safe from preventable adverse events occurring to them whilst they are in the hospital setting. Patient safety should be a of high priority to the healthcare setting and HCWs. Nursing staff are the main providers of care to patients whilst in the healthcare setting and have many responsibilities in delivering safe patient care. Whilst in the healthcare setting patients are vulnerable and at the hand of healthcare workers, thus it is extremely important for healthcare workers to maintain hand hygiene. To maintain a

Medication errors are a reoccurring issue that has plagued the medical field since the beginning of drug administration. In order to understand how to handle medication errors, one must first understand what a medication error is. The concept of medication error can be defined as: “any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or harm to a patient” (Kee, 2012, 125). Examples of medication errors include: misreading a patient’s medical file, not clarifying illegible prescriptions, an incomplete patient assessment, confusing look-alike and sound-alike medications, and lack of better understanding if a medication can be crushed or split. To better understand medication errors and medication safety one must understand the impact it can have on the medical community and patient care, ways to prevent medication errors, and what should be done in a situation where a medication error has occurred.

Medicine is an always evolving field, and continues to grow in the pursuit of people health benefit. As time has passed better research studies, discoveries, treatments and improvement of patient outcomes has been the pride of the medical field. However; despite all the improvements in medical advancement, preventable medical errors have become a major problem in the field. About a decade ago, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) investigated and created the report To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, in that report the IOM came to the conclusion that approximately 98,000 people has died yearly in the United States as a consequence of an preventable medical error (RWJF, 2011). Some of these errors are caused

Healthcare associated infections have an impact on patients - how? Can be prevented greatly with compliance to hand hygiene protocols (REF).

A mistake at any point in this flow of events could lead to a potentially adverse patient reaction. A potential error is a mistake in prescribing, dispensing or planned administration that is corrected by an intervention (Dean et. al, 2002). Using expertly designed technological applications to catch any potential errors will have a profound impact on the number of preventable adverse events in hospitals each year.

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 need to wash hands has been proven to be beneficial in decreasing Hospital Acquired Infections (HAI) since the time of our foundress, Florence Nightingale was practicing. Though this is widely understood to be beneficial, healthcare providers have consistently scored poorly on studies regarding compliance to hand washing with a rate of 39% on average. In the United States, the healthcare industry has felt an economic burden due to HAI’s which account for the largest rate of morbidity and mortality. HAI prevention is possible with the practice of hand hygiene which is the single most important task healthcare providers can offer. Diegel-Vacek & Ryan, (2016).

Are the current infection control practices not enough to control this problem? Low infection control can be influenced by factors such as increasing inpatient acuity of illness, inadequate nurse-patient staffing ratios, unavailability of system resources. Even that healthcare personal is knows the importance of hand washing in infection control, evidence based studies have shown the not adherence to this simple practice. For this reason a constant re-evaluation of infection control guidelines, and application techniques must be a continuous practice in every healthcare center. Being healthcare workers (doctors, nurse practitioners, nurses, nurses aids, and healthcare worker in general) the front line defense against hospital acquired infection applying daily infection control practices to prevent cross contamination and spread of infections is the key. For this reason all healthcare staff must receive continuous education and training about infection control, correct hand hygiene technique, and use of alcohol base hand rubs. Infection control culture and clinical staff engagement are crucial to increase appropriated level of care, and decrease infections