Quality Improvement in Patient Safety

Question 1 

Patient safety is an essential aspect of care provision, thus creating the need to put in place measures that enhance this aspect ( Pedersen, 2017) . In the case study, patient safety was overlooked with the installation of a “Code Blue” alarm that did not give the expected outcomes. The scenario could have been avoided by conducting a trial for a few rooms in the designated patient care areas to evaluate the effectiveness of the alarm before launching it in all the rooms in the two areas. The written standard for the environment of care that should have been used to avoid the situation regards the equipment used to provide support for patient care. The installed alarm constitutes equipments that ought to enhance the provision of care in the facility and, as such, should have been given ultimate attention.

Question 2 

According to Singh (2014), credentialing and re-credentialing act as important components of the healthcare system. Environment of care safety standard ought to be incorporated as a criterion in credentialing and recredentialing processes. The safety standard would be paramount in ensuring that care facilities have put in place safety equipments as well as emergency response measures in their facilities. The criteria will act to promote environment of care safety in care providing facilities.

Question 3 

Islam and Ryan (2016) define Hazard Vulnerability Analysis as systematic approaches through which risks and hazards are analyzed. An emergency operations plan encompasses the procedures and processes that a facility should follow to respond and recover from an event. In this facility, the emergency operations plan would require to address hazards. There are notable risks that would need to be addressed in the facility. The naturally occurring events and human events stand out as the hazards that should be addressed in an emergency operations plan noting that they have a hazard specific relative risk of 0.08.

References 

Islam, T., & Ryan, J. (2016). Vulnerability Assessment and Impact Analysis.  Hazard Mitigation in Emergency Management , 227-254. doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-420134-7.00007-2 

Pedersen, K. Z. (2017). Studying Patient Safety: An Introduction.  Organizing Patient Safety , 3-31. doi:10.1057/978-1-137-53786-7_1 

Singh, S. (2014). Credentialing and Privileging in Healthcare Organizations.  Handbook of Healthcare Quality and Patient Safety , 114-114. doi:10.5005/jp/books/12287_9