Over the past years, hospitals and health centres have been faced with various problems and challenges. The problems, however, require the hospitals to rethink the process they use to deliver care and other services to their patients. Under the new Affordable Care Act, the healthcare industry has to respond to the new regulatory requirements. It has been estimated that many patients die while in the hospital across the globe. According to Allen (2013), bad hospital care resulted to 180,000 patients dying while undergoing treatment in the hospitals across the U.S. in 2010. This has been a great challenge to the health care team and therefore, the health centres are looking for ways to overcome these challenges and solve the problems. Patient safety has become a global issue, and the need to address the issue is a fundamental and essential part of quality nursing care.
It has been estimated that more than 20,000 people in US and 5,000 in the UK have succumbed from an infection they received while in the hospital (Howell, 2015). Ensuring the patient’s safety and overseeing that no harm occurs to patients is thus the responsibility of the hospital team in general. This research paper is aimed at providing an examination of the current and future issues that challenge healthcare institutions. Patient safety for that matter will be the topic of discussion.
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The current quality crisis in America’s health care is well recognized. Recent studies indicate that there is no certification that patients will get high-quality services to a particular health issue (Soo-Hoon et al., 2015). The people of American are dissatisfied with chronic care, and 72% of those surveyed believe that health care providers fail to provide the necessary care for the patients. On the other hand, 76% of surveyed nurses shown that the dangerous working conditions meddled with their capacity to convey quality care, while 85% of surveyed physicians stated that lack of coordination resulted in low-quality care.
In most cases, the health care system is poorly designed thus failing to deliver what the patient needs. The high number of medical errors in the health industry is caused by lack of knowledge on how to incorporate safety principles in health care. The providers also pay little attention to issues of quality assessment and neglect their responsibilities to individuals as they move from one level of health care to another. The resulting lack of attention, miscommunication and excess costs results in patient suffering (Clarke & Donaldson, 2008).
Challenges posed by the problem
Despite efforts to minimize patient safety crisis, the health industry has far to go in making health care as safe as it needs to be. Creating a culture of patient safety is also a big concern in the industry and a major undertaking. Physicians operate in a high-anxiety environment where patients, doctor ratio are unbalanced. This in return leads to medical errors like delayed diagnosis and incomplete exams among others. Ineffective communication among team members contributes to adverse events like increase patient harm, hospital stay and resources use (Clarke & Donaldson, 2008).
Intervention focuses research that looks to enhance communitarian correspondence is deficient. As a way to improve patient safety and results, intercessions ought to concentrate on incorporating the essential traits of a coordinated effort. These ought to incorporate shared duties, shared decision-making, and open communication.
Cuts to the health care budget have reduced the available resources for new initiatives as well as reduce services for people that need it. Findings have shown that a lot of patients have experienced delays in being discharged from hospitals most cases being caused by problems accessing social care services. There has also been a lack of funding to review curriculum and teaching methods and of the resources needed to make changes.
Evidence-based support
Florence Nightingale is the one who started Evidence-based practice and basic leadership in the eighteenth century amid world war. She noticed the poor sterile circumstances in medical facilities and demise rates among the wounded soldiers and therefore tried all she could so that the hospitals could be kept clean. Since then, the progress of patient safety has evolved over time.
Patient safety was a new field when the Institute of medicines made recommendations to investigate medical errors. The IOM had noted that there were many errors in health care, and immediate reform was needed to improve the safety of the patients (Mitchell, 2008). Mistakes were thus not from physicians but resulted from the shortcomings that were in the health care systems. Previously, doctors depended intensely on their knowledge and used their senses of organs which are the eyes, nose, ears, tongue and touch to screen health status and distinguish changes. After some time, the medical attendant's unaided senses were supplanted with innovation intended to identify physical changes in patient's conditions. Patient care technology has turned out to progress, changing the way nursing care is conceptualized and conveyed. The requirement for development was the main impetus behind the advancement of PCs in health care. As much as technology improves care, it also has some risks associated. It has thus been considered as part of the problem and part of the solution. This is because technology is used today, is not 100% sure to detect the patient’s symptoms.
According to Mitchell (2008), health care outcomes including patients’ safety are as a result of the multi-faceted connection between the practitioner, technology, and the patient. For a successful computerized system in health care, it is crucial to integrate nurse’s perception, convictions, and information in the utilization of innovation and its usage. Finding the correct data in healthcare should be a continuing process with a method that will rely on upon the ground breaking and constancy of today's cutting edge medical attendant and the backing of nursing pros.
Accreditation Standards
Hospital accreditation standards are pushed as an important method for enhancing clinical practice and organizational performance. These rules enable health centers to embed efficient and practical quality improvement and patient safety initiatives into their daily operations. Accreditation is a voluntary system where trained reviewers evaluate whether the healthcare organizations meets the required performance standards (Howell et al., 2015).
Regulation and accreditation are two different things, where the regulations are a set of rules that must be followed while accreditation is a seal of endorsement. Accreditation thus is involved in the process of certifying an organization upon meeting the required standards. Quality and safety are sometimes used interchangeably in health care, but they should be distinguished. High-quality care causes less harm and blunders to patients. Quality improvement is patient safety and focuses on improving safety for patients.
These programs promote a secured culture within the healthcare industry by improving the quality of leadership and management, teamwork, effective communication, reducing job stress and anxiety as well as workload. Health centres with proper accreditation perform under elevated amounts of complexity quality and risks. These foundations have a methodology that makes blunders but with the end goal that they are adjusted in time.
Performance Improvement Initiative
The performance change program advances a society of well-being and gives a precise, facilitated and persistent way to deal with streamlining, clinical results and patient safety. Providers need to consider how they can incorporate rational execution change into their daily treatment activities. This program should thus improve its outcomes by distinguishing open doors, testing advancements and reporting the findings to the appropriate partners.
Road accidents occur almost every day, and it is a dream of every citizen to reduce this. Conducting a performance improvement and outcomes monitoring is thus necessary to achieve this goal. It is thus crucial to monitor the number of deaths that occur daily to reach the objective. Specific initiatives should thus be assessed to help eliminate road accidents. The most efficient action is determined by observing a chosen initiative, and its effects and outcomes. For instance, open administration declarations empowering low speed, seatbelt use and discouraging driving under the influence of alcohol. These announcements should be made on nationally televisions and radios for five months continuously. Toward the end of this period, results observing figures out if the advert campaign reduced road accidents. When data collection is complete, it should be handled with sensitivity as its result is used to improve control measures.
Implementation of the Plan in the Organization
A quality change arrangement is a detailed hierarchical arrangement for a human services association. It is made out of fundamental data on how the establishment will oversee, send and audit quality all through the institution (Soo-Hoon, et al., 2016). For an effective plan, the institution should have a proper communication channel. Clear communication is necessary to improve patient safety and without it, health care industries waste an immense amount of money.
Face to face is one of the richest connections that can be used within an organization. The recipient of the message interprets a message clearly when the physical presence and speakers tone are present. In the hospital setting, the use of mobile phones is an essential communication channel as it saves on time. Electronic communication channels like emails, the internet, and social media platforms are necessary for a one on one or group discussion (Soo-Hoon, et al., 2016). Messages ought to be made in a manner that they are clear. Written letters are also a means of good communication in hospitals as they reach to the employees well. They include memos, notices, announcements and letters.
Health research mostly examines the information that deals with the safety of the patients. Executing proof based security practices are included and require techniques that address the multi-layered aspect of frameworks of consideration. Evidence-based practices control trials, unmistakable and subjective exploration, and in addition the case, reports information's, consistent standards and master feeling (Howell et al., 2015). Its use is crucial in guiding health care decisions. When the research evidence has been collected, the practice should be guided in a professional manner. Where there is no sufficient research, health care decision making should be made through expert opinion and scientific principles.
Collecting data on medical errors is essential as it improves patient safety. Data was collected in some New York City to report hypothetical errors. Responses were received from 300 participants, and the response rate was 70%.The respondents who confirmed that reporting errors improved the quality of care for future patients was 80%.With 70% stating that they would report hypothetical errors that caused harm to patients. It was discovered that 50 % were aware of how to report a mistake yet 10% reported hypothetical errors.
To improve patient safety, individual should be well aware of the issues that bring about medical errors. Such learning is gained by the examination of information gathered through blunder reporting frameworks. The reporting consequently depends on an expert society in which doctors view error exposure as a fundamental piece of learning and quality change.
Success of the Performance Improvement Plan
Hospitals recently have experienced greater financial pressures. It is not clear whether the economic pressures have increased safety problems but there is a relationship between patient safety and financial performance outcomes. It is evident that whenever the hospital profit margins decline, adverse patient safety increases (Mitchell, 2008). It is, therefore, likely that money related weights constrain a doctor's facilities capacity to make immoderate interests in patient wellbeing enhancements and lead to a society security issue over the healing centre. In hospital budgets, those with a high cash flow pay off debts quicker allowing them to put further in the capital at a lower cost than destitute doctor's facilities. With more capital they update their offices and can draw in more piece of the overall industry, expanding benefits. On the other hand, if wellbeing industry puts resources into patient security enhancements, however, are confined in their capacity to raise costs; lower net revenues will be connected with better patient wellbeing results. The impact of money related execution on patient wellbeing is continuous. The money related execution adds to quality control, staffing changes and different zones which influence patient outcomes.
Staff deficiencies proceeding with cost expansion and administration request have heightened the call for more compelling and proficient utilization of rare assets through coordinated policy conveyance models (Mitchell, 2008). These health systems provide superior performance regarding quality and safety as a result of effective communication and standardized protocols. The idea of health facilities transforming to IT enabled initiative has allowed them to achieve stated objectives of improving quality and decreasing costs.
When people do not communicate properly, high chances to harm the patient in a dimension of ways will occur. Poor communication among physicians, nurses, patients, providers and others contribute to patient risk-adjusted mortality. Analysis of communication events found out that 30% of communication problems were brought about by failure to effective communication (Soo-Hoon, et al., 2016).Integration should thus focus on tending to basic characteristics of a joint effort, open correspondence, shared duties and basic leadership and coordination. Furthermore, preparing has improved correspondence and cooperation giving a component to expanded wellbeing and a change in new states of mind and conduct. A good communication strategy that would be crucial for continued engagement would thus be utilized as a situational arrangement guide for staff and provider correspondence with respect to changes in patient status or prerequisites. The guide would thus include a situation analysis to analyse the patient, a clinical background analysis, assessment of the problem and recommendations. This would give a standardized communication method in patient care circumstances. Moreover, it bridges the gap between correspondence styles and gets colleagues moving in the same direction.
In summary, understanding security has risen because of a high commonness of avoidable unfriendly occasions. In an effort to reduce health care errors, safe practices should be implemented in applicable clinical care settings. In the most basic sense, safe practices give a guide that can be utilized to explore health care's complicated highway in a way that streamlines the like hood of a safe outcome.
References
Allen, M. (2013). How many die from medical mistakes in U.S. hospitals? ProPublica . Retrieved from https://www.propublica.org/article/how-many-die-from-medical-mistakes-in-us-hospitals.
Clarke, S. & Donaldson, N. (2008). Nurse Staffing and Patient Care Quality and Safety. Agency For Healthcare Research And Quality (US) . Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2676/.
Howell, A., Burns, E. M., Bouras, G., Donaldson, L. J., Athanasiou, T., & Darzi, A. (2015). Can Patient Safety Incident Reports Be Used to Compare Hospital Safety? Results from a Quantitative Analysis of the English National Reporting and Learning System Data. Plos ONE, 10 (12), 1-15.
Mitchell, P. (2008). Defining Patient Safety and Quality Care. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (US) . Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2681/.
Soo-Hoon, L., Phan, P. H., Dorman, T., Weaver, S. J., Pronovost, P. J., & Lee, S. (2016). Handoffs, safety culture, and practices: evidence from the hospital survey on patient safety culture. BMC Health Services Research, 161-8.
