Patient safety is paramount for quality care delivery. Patients must not only be physically safe but also feel to be free from any physical, psychological, or emotional danger. The community’s multicultural nature necessitates creating a diverse healthcare facility environment where all patients are comfortable. Besides, no act of violation should befall any patient at any given moment when receiving care services. Patients have their rights which must be observed at all times. Healthcare professionals and other stakeholders whose actions directly or indirectly affect the patients should recognize specific patient wants and ensure they are delivered unless they compromise the care delivery process. Also, the patient should be aware of their rights, including confidentiality rights, to appropriately exercise them. Patient safety can be ensured by creating a workplace that is not only keen on the physical dangers but also recognizes the emotional needs of the clients (World Health Organization, 2019). The patients should work hand in hand with the professionals to ensure they remain safe in the workplace environment.
Major Stakeholders
Healthcare facilities and the associated stakeholders can use different approaches to establish a safe patient environment. The first group of stakeholders involved in enhancing patient safety is the healthcare professional training institutions. Schools mandated to train and certify qualified individuals to serve as nurses, doctors, or other healthcare personnel must actively be engaged in improving patient safety, which contributes to improved quality of care (World Health Organization, 2019). The government is the second set of stakeholders to enhance patient safety during healthcare service delivery. The government has the resources which are essential for physician training as well as buying the equipment. Besides, the government has the power to determine the best practices expected of a healthcare professional. The patient is another stakeholder in ensuring their safety. The individual clients understand their needs better than anyone else and would provide the most reliable guide for the healthcare professionals to ensure their safety. Fourth, healthcare institution administrative and human resource management teams must actively establish a safe environment for the patients. They have the power to supervise healthcare professional activities, determine any problems that may result in safety hazards in the hospital, and address them appropriately. Therefore, all four key stakeholders must be brought to the board to achieve the crucial goal of improving patient safety during care delivery.
When to Act
Patient safety should be enhanced right from professional training to the aftercare stage. Physicians should join the profession when they already understand the weight of patient safety and its contribution to quality care delivery. Another crucial even when Action that should be taken toward patient safety is when creating healthcare policies. The policymakers, including selected senior medical professionals, the government, and the health institution administrative and human resource managers, need to create policies that recognize the need for patient safety. Thirdly, safety should be given significant weight when establishing or restating healthcare institutions’ vision and mission statements and drafting internal operation policies. Additionally, professional-client collaboration should be an area of focus during the care delivery process as it improves opportunities for safety enhancement.
Safety Activities
Healthcare professionals
Nurses, doctors, and other physicians directly engage in care delivery. They constantly interact with the patients and observe them as they recover after receiving care services. Some safety issues in the healthcare facility result from neglect or improper patient handling. Healthcare professionals administering treatment services to patients need to ensure that they are handled in a manner that they feel comfortable and content with the quality of service they receive (Dhamanti et al., 2019). These should include showing empathy when delivering treatment by avoiding any activity that can cause harm to the patient. For instance, physicians should avoid the tendency to communicate rudely with patients when they complain of pain. Instead, they should take a closer look at the patient’s cause of pain and provide a remedy if necessary. Also, the nurses should review their records to ensure misunderstandings that may result in patient misdiagnosis and poisoning. Many patients get readmitted because of misdiagnosis caused by confusion in the patient data recording process.
Healthcare Facility Management
Professionals’ actions are greatly influenced by the policies specific to their place of work. Although all the nurses are trained to handle every patient’s issue with the utmost care, they may disengage some of the principles of care delivery if they do not seem to be priorities in the healthcare facility they are working for. As a result, the healthcare administrative and human resource management teams should collaborate with the workers to identify the ethical codes of conduct and include them in the facility policy (Flavin & Erstad, 2022). Every healthcare institution has a set of policies that guides the professional’s behaviors and outlines the consequences for deviating from them. Policies create an environment where accountability and responsibility among professionals in a firm are observed. Now more than ever, all healthcare service-providing institutions should develop policies that focus on patient safety (Flavin & Erstad, 2022). Patient safety is important to the client and has substantial economic benefits to the facilities.
Healthcare Training Institutions
All professionals are trained to do their work in the best way possible. Each institution creates a syllabus that must meet the threshold conditions set by nursing or professional healthcare boards in the United States. When delivering care services, qualified physicians focus more on matters that were given weight while training ( Wu & Busch, 2019). Therefore, the institutions and syllabus creators have to introduce patient safety as one of the key areas during training. They need to make the students know that patient safety is paramount and understand the various ways of ensuring the clients are safe in different situations in the service delivery process.
Government
Government stands as the chief agent in every activity that occurs in the country. In the healthcare facility, they deliver the resources used in care delivery, work with the facility administration to ensure proper staffing, and create threshold conditions that the healthcare institutions need to meet when serving the community. Government agents visit and supervise the performance of individual institutions (Dhamanti et al., 2019). In addition to determining the principles of operation by the healthcare facilities, the government works with the training institutions to determine the best curriculum for healthcare training students. The government should use its influence to ensure that learners are equipped with patient safety skills. Furthermore, the government should help organizations secure sufficient equipment to improve patient safety during care delivery.
Patients
Patients know their needs and should also learn to cooperate with doctors to observe any special demands during care delivery (Health, 2017). They should inquire about anything they do not understand and comply with any reasonable request of the physicians to make it easier to deliver the care services.
How the Action Could Look Like
Each stakeholder taking their roles toward patient safety seriously can result in more efficient, cost-effective, and improved precision in patient care activities. If patients and professionals create the desired relationship, the result can be spectacular as they both do not find it difficult to interact. The level of satisfaction among both stakeholders would be greatly improved. Additionally, the quality will significantly improve when professionals, administration, and government collaborate to prioritize patient safety.
Why the Action Positively Influences the Future of Healthcare
The cost of living is consistently rising. Meanwhile, the cost of medication is gradually getting unbearable. Also, as time goes on, various diseases threaten the well-being of people in the community. Safety among patients stands as one of the methods through which the costs of medication can be lowered. Firstly, if safety is ensured, the incidences of patient readmission due to in-hospital infection can be lowered if not eliminated (World Health Organization, 2019). Secondly, if the doctors appropriately perform their tasks, the patients can better care for themselves and avoid illnesses. The instances of some patients falling victim to common diseases because of a lack of information on self-care would be eliminated.
Conclusion
Patient safety is an area of healthcare quality improvement that requires the collaboration of all the care stakeholders. Should all the stakeholders answer to their duties and complete their roles towards healthcare service delivery in a sufficient manner, the issue of patient risk and hazards would be much lowered. The patients, on the other hand, would be satisfied, while the other stakeholders find it easier and less economical to manage care delivery services.
References
Dhamanti, I., Leggat, S.G., & Barraclough, S. (2019). The Role of Governments in the Implementation of Patient Safety and Patient Safety Incident Reporting in Indonesia: A Qualitative Study. Healthcare, 7(2), 64. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare7020064
Flavin, B., & Erstad, W. (2022). 5 Factors that Can Improve Patient Safety in Hospitals | Rasmussen University. Rasmussen.edu. https://www.rasmussen.edu/degrees/health-sciences/blog/patient-safety-in-hospitals/
Health, S. (2017, March 14). PatientEngagementHIT. 5 Patient-Centered Strategies to Improve Patient Safety. PatientEngagementHIT. https://patientengagementhit.com/news/5-patient-centered-strategies-to-improve-patient-safety
World Health Organization. (2019, September 13). Patient Safety. Who.int; World Health Organization: WHO. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/patient-safety#:~:text=It%20aims%20to%20prevent%20and,delivering%20quality%20essential%20health%20services.
Wu, A. W., & Busch, I. M. (2019). Patient safety: a new basic science for professional education. GMS Journal for Medical Education, 36(2), Doc21. https://doi.org/10.3205/zma001229
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