The National Patient Safety Goals are some of the main methods by which The Joint Commission comes up with standards that ensure patients safety in all aspects of the health care environment. The Joint Commission revises the goals regularly depending on their impact, cost, and effectiveness (Sittig & Singh, 2012). The regular reviews ensure that health care facilities prevent any harm to the patients.
The 2019 National Patient Safety Goals for all hospitals have been simplified in a simple plain English to facilitate easy application, easy to understand and remember. The goals have been made vibrant as an ideal way to gain the attention of the staff members and also to emphasize incorporating safety in everyday activities in the hospitals. When the staff gets into the habit of practicing the goals, then they can provide excellent patient care.
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One of the National Patient Safety Goals is Patient identification which is vital in any health care facility. Errors in the case of patient identification have been the most severe global healthcare issue when it comes to patient safety (Wachter, 2009). Many adverse events have occurred due to patient identification errors in the past couple of years. The main procedures for the prevention of patient identification mistakes are by using at least two identifiers, standardizing the patient identification process, checking of accurate wristbands and elimination of shortcuts. Good surgical site marks, surgical checklist and mandatory time-out are some of the standardized units in any healthcare center.
The surgical checklists have played a crucial role in the improvement of mortality rate and a decrease in complications from surgery. When the health practitioners interact with the patients, they are advised to treat the patient as partners in the effort to prevent any avoidable harm in healthcare. For example, the hospital staff should be instructed to let the patients state their identifiers rather than asked to confirm their identifiers. All hospital staff members should be trained in patient safety concepts and methods to improve patient participation.
One of the opportunities in my environment is medication safety where the new medication management approaches are improved. Medication errors have occurred frequently, leading to an increase in patient harm in hospital settings. The increase in these cases has led many hospitals to design medication safety initiatives which encourage education and learning to improve medication use processes (Sittig & Singh, 2012). The hospitals around my environment have come up with published data to increase awareness of this critical patient issue to share these experiences from the medication error incidences to encourage a more open patient safety culture.
One of the significant challenges related to achieving patient safety is staff communication. There is a considerable challenge in the staff forum which is overcoming a perceived lack of ownership when a mistake occurs. The boundaries between professionalism, disciplinary action, and managerial groups create an obstacle to change and also to create a consensus between the staff is not always received with open arms. Some staff members may feel ambushed, offended and belittled if requested to improve or change their ways of doing things around the hospital environment. Managers and the frontline staff can be challenging to engage since they already face competing for clinical demands and in most cases, they are inadequately staffed, with limited resources and equipment shortages.
In conclusion, the efforts put into improving patient safety are vital in that they help promote awareness of what goes on in the healthcare institution and also to decrease the number of damages that occur during patient treatment as well as save many lives lost due to staff negligence. These reviews and evaluations play a significant role to enable both gains and losses, which are learning opportunities. The health foundation has indicated that the change is a challenging, slow and painful process but it is not impossible to gain success from it.
References
Sittig, D. F., & Singh, H. (2012). Electronic health records and national patient-safety goals. The New England Journal of Medicine , 367 (19), 1854–1860. doi:10.1056/NEJMsb1205420. Wachter, R. M. (2009). Patient safety at ten: unmistakable progress, troubling gaps. Health Affairs , 29 (1), 165-173.
