Every year the Joint Commission comes up with patient safety goals and standards that healthcare organizations and staff should an aim to achieve. The goals are based on emerging issues in the healthcare field. For 2020, the Joint Commission has improving patient identification procedures as one of its National Patient Safety Goals. Specifically, it recommends the use of at least two patient identifiers when providing treatment, care, and other services. The acceptable identifiers are person-specific features such as names, telephone numbers, and identification numbers.
Proper patient identification is crucial in the hospital setting; patient misidentification is one of the leading causes of medical errors. For instance, between January 2013 and August 2015, about 181 medical organizations voluntarily reported more than 7,500 medical errors involving patient misidentification (ECRI, 2016) . In the hospital setting, misidentification can happen at any stage of the care or treatment provision process. For instance, the clerks at the administration office can enter wrong patient details in the system while a laboratory officer can label a sample with incorrect patient details. Nurses and physicians rely on different patient characteristics such as age and diagnosis history to diagnose conditions and prescribe medication. Identification errors can either lead to missing patient records or make physicians use incorrect details to diagnose a patient's condition. The use of at least two patient identifiers, as advocated for by the Joint Commission, will standardize patient identification procedures in the hospital setting and reduce the probability of wrong-patient errors.
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The responsibility of identifying patients using at least two identifiers does not rest on the nurses only; almost every member of the hospital clinical team has a role to play to prevent wrong-patient errors. Again, patient identification errors can occur at any stage of the clinical process, so the staff involved at every stage should always be alert. For example, the clerks should ensure patient details are captured correctly, laboratory staff should ensure that samples bear the correct patient details, and hospital pharmacists should confirm that they are giving medication to the intended patients.
References
ECRI. (2016, November 29). Patient Identification Lessons Learned from ECRI Institute's 2016 Deep Dive . Retrieved May 3, 2020, from ECRI Institute Patient Safety Orgarnizations: https://www.healthitoutcomes.com/doc/mismatched-how-patient-identification-errors-are-costing-patients-and-health-systems-0001
