Health care is the process of maintaining and improving the health status of a patient through diagnosing, preventing, treating, care of disease and other health impairments to ensure the patient’s body functions normally. Thus, because of the skills needed to handle different sickness and illness, healthcare practitioners are required to train for professionalism; this doesn’t take out problems that they face as they interact with patients, a human is to error but there are always chances of improving to ensure that these errors are minimized. However, the health care industry is faced with problems and this discussion focuses on medical error, a current issue in the health care industry. Medical error is a public health care problem that threatens the safety of the patient ( Senders, 2018 ).
Medical Error
This is an issue that must be addressed to ensure that patients and other people have hope of recovering from illness in case they are attacked with sicknesses. Patients’ safety plays an important role in the medical field and because of more literature that researchers are coming up with; the public has been put to attention because more cases are reported on medical errors ( Thomas, 2016 ). To determine the level of medical errors that exist in the health care industries researchers have employed surrogate measures of the problem which is largely based on the patient’s outcome.
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Once physicians make a medical error, it’s hard to reverse the problem and in some countries and continents it is the leading cause of death, an example is North America and between 44,000 and 98,000 die each year. Examples of medical errors include cases where the physician prescribes drugs that are not related to the suffering of the patient thus the patient consumes them with the hope that s/he will get better which is not the case. A second example is physicians’ forgetting surgical instruments in the body of the patient ( Pereira-Lima and Sen, 2019 ).
The third is doing surgery or amputation to a patient that needs different medical attention. The health care industry requires more attention than any industry because they deal with matters of life and death for the patient. The model below is an analysis of medical error and is based on the reason for the hospital environment where layers of defense are offered in cases of error as seen in the slices of Swiss cheese. Despite the defense and safeguards, several holes exist in the slices and a patient might be injured when situations come up to affect the flaw from one slice ( Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality )
Causes of Medical Error in Health care Organizations
The first problem is the inadequate flow of information. In health care; information is critical because it involves different regions within the same organization, thus clear and undistorted information is required to ensure that patients’ are attended to effectively. There is a problem that is related to the lack of a clear flow of information; this includes poor prescription decisions where the physician gives the wrong prescription to the patient and the patient ends up dying ( Macias and Srinivasan, 2017 ). The second is when the test results from the patient are not communicated hence the patient is not benefited because the medics deal with different problems that the patient is not suffering from thus making a medical error that will threaten the life of the patient.
The second cause for the medical error is human problems; this occurs when physicians fail to follow the set principles, rules and regulations like in cases where the patients' specimens might not be properly labeled. This confuses the medics because they do not know which test sample belongs to which patient, thus through assumption, they give medical descriptions to the patients. However, they could interchange and give different processes to wrong patients thus erring. This is life-threatening because the patients might die if the disease affecting them kills within a short time. After all, the physicians might not have another time to engage in reversing the process, some procedures are as well irreversible hence care must be exercised ( Senders, 2018 ).
The other cause is the organizational transfer of knowledge; the health care providers are incompetent and inexperienced because of a lack of information on what they are dealing with. Health care organizations have specialization; there are those dealing with eyes only hence they might not deal with the brain and those dealing with the heart might not deal with the kidney. However, body organs work as a single entity, where the brain is in one way connected with the eyes, the kidney with the heart. If we deal with them separately a patient could be suffering from kidney but this could be a secondary sign of different diseases ( Thomas, 2016 ). The untrained physicians might give wrong descriptions and decisions because to them they lack proper knowledge on how to go about a given disease.
Technical failures; cause physicians to make assumptions because of lack of modern health care technology for testing diseases. Majority of health care organizations endeavor in offering services through asking the patients how they feel; this is to mean that they deal with how the patient is feeling to make decisions of the disease the patient is suffering from, but some diseases have same symptoms hence make medical errors because they are not sure, and they cannot care out proper medical check-up because of poor technology ( Pereira-Lima and Sen, 2019 ).
Solutions to Medical Error(s)
The health care organization should adopt a structure for handoff conversations; this will help ensure that medical errors are minimized. With clear communication, the patient will get proper services that address their issues. The second solution to this is to have the pharmacists involved directly in the treatment of the patient. This will allow the doctors and nurses to know how a given drug description will affect the patient and give other recommendations that will help the patient. The physicians should as well avoid diagnosis errors through labeling of the tests to ensure that patients get the required treatment ( Lawson and West, 2018).
With modern diagnosing technology the patient can get proper treatment of their suffering hence minimizing medical errors. The other solution is ensuring that the medical staff is trained well and the juniors are assigned senior physicians who they consult on medical complications that they are not aware of ( Macias and Srinivasan, 2017 ). This will minimize the trial and error that might be experienced in the medical industry.
Conclusion
In summary, medical error(s) is a threat to the health of the patient and should be considered with intelligence to ensure that people are not dying because of carelessness. Without proper medical attention, more errors will be experienced hence more deaths thus low population globally because of poor medical attention from the physicians. The patients need it good care, our children need it as well thus physicians should be provided with modern medical machines to improve the health conditions of the people not to treat patients based on symptoms ( Lawson and West, 2018).
References
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. (n.d.). EPC evidence-based reports. Retrieved from http://www.ahrq.gov/research/findings/evidence-based-reports/index.html
Lawson, N. D., Shanafelt, T. D., Tawfik, D. S., Morgenthaler, T. I., Satele, D. V., Sinsky, C., ... & West, C. P. (2018, November). Burnout is Not Associated With Increased Medical Errors/In Reply. In Mayo Clinic Proceedings (Vol. 93, No. 11, pp. 1683-1684). Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research.
Macias, C. G., Loveless, J. N., Jackson, A. N., & Srinivasan, S. (2017). Delivering value through evidence-based practice. Clinical Pediatric Emergency Medicine, 18(2), 89–97.
Pereira-Lima, K., Mata, D. A., Loureiro, S. R., Crippa, J. A., Bolsoni, L. M., & Sen, S. (2019). Association Between Physician Depressive Symptoms and Medical Errors: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. JAMA network open , 2 (11), e1916097-e1916097.
Senders, J. W. (2018). Medical devices, medical errors, and medical accidents. In Human error in medicine (pp. 159-177). CRC Press.
Thomas, S. J. (2016). Does evidence-based health care have room for the self? Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 22(4), 502–508.
