Patient Safety & Satisfaction Essay Paper
Patient safety and patient satisfaction are the two closely related concepts. This is the task of all hospitals to secure provision of such level of care, which is safe and meets the expectations of the patients regarding service quality. Introduction of the corresponding values among staff members and promoting of them could contribute to securing safety and satisfaction by the patients. Nurses usually spend a lot of time by the patients, they have direct contact with them and this means that they are able to learn them better and are expected to contribute their effort and energy towards protecting their patients from potential harms. In addition to this nurses are in the position of having the chance to better address the psychological needs of the patients along with their physical ones. Thus patient safety is a vital and integral component of quality of nursing care. Health care professionals in the modern setting are to face a great number of challenges, when they try to keep their patients safe. Patient Safety & Satisfaction Essay Paper
1. Cost saving is one of the desired aims in the sphere of health care. Patient safety is one of the factors, which could contribute to cost saving. Generally patient safety is related to certain rules and practices, which are designed in order to prevent any injury or harm of patients. Medical error efforts are also included into this category. Errors are defined as adverse events, which result from unintended harm from medical care. Medical errors usually include failure to complete the needed tests, treatment mistakes, delays in treatment, which could have been avoided and so on. “Patient safety also includes efforts to reduce health care-associated infections that result from treatment in a hospital or other medical care setting. The goal of patient safety initiatives is to reduce pain, suffering and deaths associated with preventable, unintended harm to a patient.” (Wolosin, 2008, p. 3). Lapses in patient safety are definitely related to additional costs.Patient Safety & Satisfaction Essay Paper
Nowadays healthcare organizations are under the financial pressure and many of them prefer to use various cost cutting methods. Costs could be reduced via staff reductions for example, but this could hardly be considered a good option. This is the reason why many hospitals are looking for alternative ways to reduce their costs and one of them is improving the level of patient safety and increate of the level of care quality. These strategies could include different steps. For example reduction of “never events” means that the number of infections, erroneous amputations, falls is reduced. First of all it would contribute to safety of the patients and could be good practice to withstand financial pressures. One more example could be related to improving of supply chains. It is utterly important to secure more effective restocking process for the needed materials. Timely inventory measures could help to secure safety of the patients and at the same time could allow saving costs. Reduce length of stay is effective and is not related to pushing patients home earlier, than it is possible. Instead it means that the length of stay could be reduced with the help of preventing errors, cases of miscommunication, poor planning. On the surface all these aspects are not related to costs, however the extended length of stay might help to save millions.
2. The Joint Commission is an independent and not-for-profit organization, which certifies and accredits up to 21.000 health care organizations and programs in America. Accreditation and certification of the Joint Commission are accepted as the signs of quality and correspondence of the organizational performance standards. The mission of this organization is to contribute to improving of health care for the society in the process of collaboration with other stakeholders, conducting of evaluation of health care organizations and motivating and inspiring them to strive towards only safe and effective care of the highest quality.
“The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, in collaboration with health professionals and others, is pursuing a process for assessing health care organizations that incorporates contemporary approaches to evaluating health care quality, while stimulating organizations to meet or exceed standards through recommendations for improvement and through education and consultation.” (Schyve, 2006, p. 54). In order to reach these aims the Commission considered a number of measurement systems, which could be matched to the standards-based surveys, conducted in order to accredit health care organizations. The Joint Commission works in the direction of improving the situation with patient safety via implementing a number of strategies. The Commission works out such standards, which could be applied to measuring of the medication use, medical equipment emergency management, security, etc. The Commission offers the road map for creation of a fully integrated patient safety system. The Joint Commission does monitoring of legislative initiatives at the state and federal levels, supports the corresponding measures for improving of patient safety. Reports about patient safety events from patients, government agencies, the public are sent to The Joint Commission. This bulk of information is utilized for improving of the quality of health care. “An affiliate of The Joint Commission, Joint Commission Resources (JCR) provides a variety of products and services, including education programs, publications and online software; its Continuous Service Readiness program; consultative technical assistance services; and accreditation and consulting for organizations abroad.” (Schyve, 2006, p. 54). Patient Safety & Satisfaction Essay Paper
3. The quality and safety or patient care is closely related to the work environment of the nurses. Nurses constitute the largest health care workforce and thus their application of knowledge and skills plays vitally important role for meeting the changing needs of their patients. Thus a great portion of the demands of patient care is based exactly on the work of nurses. In those situations, when care is not adequate due to any reason, either lack of resources or workforce shortages or lack of the correct policies and standards, nurses are to take even greater responsibilities. “. High-reliability organizations that have cultures of safety and capitalize on evidence-based practice offer favorable working conditions to nurses and are dedicated to improving the safety and quality of care.” (Hughes, 2008, p. 152). The roles and responsibilities of nurses do not remain static, they change over time in order to correspond to the current needs and demands of the society. Such issues as risk management, case management clinical trials and patient care managing have changed recently. At the moment the nurse’s role in securing patient safety and health care quality improvement is a rather new research field and thus there is an evident need to focus upon the relationships between different organizational system factors, clinical processes and patient safety. Active participation in the process of such research is one of the tasks for each modern nurse. Contributing to patient safety is definitely one of the important tasks for the nurse, it could be done via establishing of effective and open forms of communication with the patients, securing positive psychological and physical environment for the patients, focusing upon avoiding of medical errors and unnecessary testing. Generally the sphere of health care is rather sophisticated, it provides a lot of challenges and opportunities to the individuals, engaged into the process of providing health care. Only under the condition that each single specialist would do his best at his level, there is a chance to secure improvements in patient safety.Patient Safety & Satisfaction Essay Paper
4. It was already mentioned that ensuring of patient safety is one of the most vital jobs for all health care professionals. This is the reason why the Institute of Medicine recommends all professionals in the sphere of health care to contribute to creating a culture of safety and be ready to timely report about medical errors. Hospital leadership could support this position via collaborating for building the culture on the basis of patient safety standards. Patient Safety Officers are to support this organizational culture and promote it within their organizations. Measuring of performance improvement is one of the important activities, which should be performed by PSO, in order to lead the organization and the personnel towards performance improvement. The PSO takes the responsibility for concrete identification of the safety performance measures. They work with board members in order to help them to completely embrace the transformational patient safety strategy of their organization. “In doing so, board members must own their duty to oversee patient safety with the same level of vigilance they have for strategic planning and hospital finances otherwise patient safety will not be positioned as a strategic imperative in the organization.” (Edmond, 2018, p. 2). Under the condition that the PSO work together over the shaping of the culture of patient safety promotion, it is possible to draw the attention of all health care professionals at all levels towards this top priority.
Overall, the issues of patient safety belong to the list of top priorities in the sphere of modern health care. Patient safety is related to saving costs, to securing effective work of all staff members; patient safety is meaningful for each individual patient as well as for the society in general. Supporting of the patient safety strategies is one of the most important responsibilities of all participants of health care process.Patient Safety & Satisfaction Essay Paper