Summary Description of the Type of Risk Management Plan
The risk management plan selected is patient-centered. The plan was adopted by John Hopkins Hospital in its mission to become a global leader in the safety of care delivery. The hospital relies on The Comprehensive Unit-Based Program, which seeks to alienate patient safety hazards by rigorously training frontline teams. Since being adopted in 2002, the model has helped the hospital to improve safety practices, including increased hand-washing, fewer pressures ulcers among patients, and positive outcomes in hospital staff’s perception of the hospital’s safety culture. Further evidence of the model’s effectiveness has been evidenced by reduced cases of bloodstream infections in intensive care units. Although the primary aim of this model is getting positive outcomes in the care of patients, its success has been facilitated by the hospital’s decision to make system-wide alignments for promoting a culture of high safety standards.
This model was chosen because it addresses an important aspect of healthcare. It is important to acknowledge the struggles to realize the vision of eliminating harm to patients during care delivery. Moreover, most methods for incident analysis, a primary objective in assessing and dealing with patient safety incidents, are time and labor intensive. It is thus essential to identify ways in which these challenges can be handled towards achieving the desired safety standards.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Description of the Recommended Administrative Steps and Processes in a Typical Health Care Organization Risk Management Program contrasted with the Administrative Steps and Processes identify in the selected example Plan.
In a typical health care organization, risk management plans incorporate five basic steps namely: establishing the context; identifying risks; analyzing risk; evaluating risk; and treating or managing risk (Briner, 2010). The first step requires the hospital to determine the setting in which risk management is to be conducted, such as the intensive care unit, the operating room, and emergency room. Having established the context, managers use a risk management tool to determine the sources of risk. Some of the aspects that are analyzed are the level of risk; underlying causes; and the measures that exist for handling the issues at hand. The next step is risk evaluation, which begins with accepting the risk before treating the risk, controlling risk, and engaging avoidance strategies.
On the contrary, John Hopkins Hospital uses a rather comprehensive risk management model with diverse elements covering managerial as well as clinical practices. The first strategy is to encourage the hospital’s leadership to communicate the importance of patient safety and to set goals for making patient safety a priority of the organization (Klein & McCarthy, 2011; Paine, Baker, Rosenstein & Pronovost, 2004). Secondly, the hospital educates all staff on the science of safety. This helps the staff to easily recognize and deal with threats to patient safety as they emerge. Thirdly, the hospital ties patient safety efforts to the core values of the institution, including the objectives of research and discovery. Next, the hospital seeks to spread the safety program in a manner that helps frontline teams to methodically improve patient safety (Klein & McCarthy, 2011). As a final strategy, the hospital enhances transparency of performance on safety measures. This is done by conducting internal reporting with the goal of encouraging staff members to improve patient safety (Klein & McCarthy, 2011).
Analysis of the Key Agencies and Organizations that Regulate the Administration of Safe Health Care and the Roles each play in the Risk Management Oversight Process.
Several agencies and organizations are involved in regulating and administering safe healthcare. The most influential are the government health agencies which include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Institutes of Health. The Joint Commission, a non-government agency, is also involved in creating standards for quality and safety of care.
One of the primary missions of the CDC is to provide protection for patients and healthcare providers while upholding safety, quality, and value in healthcare delivery. The CDC achieves its missions by focusing on 9 key areas, among them being promoting the efficacy of new interventions for patient safety. Other CDC’s objectives include that of ensuring that the quality of water in healthcare settings is the best possible, upholding clinical microbiology lab quality, and a focus on identifying and dealing with emerging antimicrobial-resistant infections (Shlaes et al. 1997; McKibben et al. 2005). The National Institutes of Health is the primary federal agency for performing and promoting medical research. It plays an important role in making crucial medical discoveries that improve the lives of the people; this cannot be achieved without regulating and administering safe healthcare, an important secondary objective of the agency (McKibben et al. 2005). The Joint Commission focuses on improving the quality and safety of care by implementing state-of-the-art standards. This commission uses a certification and accreditation system that reflects its commitment to meeting high-level performance standards.
Evaluation of the selected Exemplar Risk Management Plan regarding Compliance with the American Society of Healthcare Risk Management (ASHRM) Standards relevant to Privacy, Health Care Worker Safety, and Patient Safety.
According to the American Society of Healthcare Risk Management (ASHRM), a risk management plan ought to include several basic components, one of which is the presence of a designated, trained and experienced risk manager who must continually obtain risk management education on an annual basis (Kavaler & Alexander, 2014). In an effort to uphold high safety standards, one of the hospital’s strategies entails relying on highly trained individuals in the management team, which suggests the hospital’s commitment to meeting this objective. Another component of risk management plans, according to ASHRM, is that institutions ought to commit the necessary resources to risk management through written policy statements that are adopted throughout the institutions (Kavaler & Alexander, 2014). John Hopkins Hospital meets this agenda in the sense that it has made patient safety a primary objective that has been adopted across all managerial aspects of the organizations.
There is also evidence that John Hopkins hospital meets ASHRM’s requirement that health facilities must have a system in place for the identification, review, and analysis of unanticipated adverse outcomes (Kavaler & Alexander, 2014). This is part of the hospital’s The Comprehensive Unit-Based Program, which requires that hospital staff are constantly educated on the importance of safety, which also entails avoiding adverse outcomes. Moreover, the hospital is dedicated to being transparent on performance on safety measures (Kavaler & Alexander, 2014). The objective of transparency follows ASHRM’s requirement that risk managers should present information on individual practitioners, including knowledge of adverse outcomes and incident reporting data.
Proposed Recommendations or Changes that could be made to John Hopkins Hospital’s Risk Management Program to Enhance, Improve, or secure Compliance Standards.
For the John Hopkins Hospital’s risk management program to yield even better results, several adjustments could be made. One way of doing this is by adding a risk management responsibility system which should also be reinforced by a reward and punishment system. Group leaders should be tasked with managing their own sets of mandates and should be able to hold personnel responsible for handling their tasks well (Guo, 2015). Awarding personnel for performing exemplary will go a long way in motivating them to uphold the culture of the institution. Punishing those that show laxity will also help in eliminating careless mistakes.
To help health practitioners and other staff within the hospital to be better prepared to deal with risk as it arises, it is relevant that the hospital adopts a communication and consultation mechanism. Communication will not only involve those in direct contact with patients in operating rooms but also with all hospital employees. With everyone participating and serving their role right, it will be easier to improve response channels, thus dealing with risk factors as they emerge (Kavaler & Alexander, 2014). Consequently, the hospital will be better placed to comply with ASHRM’s requirement that organizations must have a centralized way of sharing and integrating data.
References
Ali Yawar Alam (2016) Steps in the Process of Risk Management in Healthcare. Journal of Epidemiology Preventive Medicine 2(2): 118.
Briner, M., Kessler, O., Pfeiffer, Y., Wehner, T., & Manser, T. (2010). Assessing hospitals' clinical risk management: Development of a monitoring instrument. BMC Health Services Research , 10 (1), 337.
Guo, L. (2015). Implementation of a risk management plan in a hospital operating room. International Journal of Nursing Sciences , 2 (4), 348-354.
Kavaler, F., & Alexander, R. S. (2014). Risk management in healthcare institutions: Limiting liability and enhancing care . Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.
Klein, S., & McCarthy, D. (2011). Johns Hopkins Medicine: Embedding Patient Safety in a University-Affiliated Integrated Health Care Delivery System. Commonwealth Fund pub , 1474 (6)
McKibben, L., Horan, T. C., Tokars, J. I., Fowler, G., Cardo, D. M., Pearson, M. L., & Brennan, P. J. (2005). Guidance on public reporting of healthcare-associated infections: recommendations of the Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology , 26 (6), 580-587.
Paine, L. A., Baker, D. R., Rosenstein, B., & Pronovost, P. J. (2004). The Johns Hopkins Hospital: identifying and addressing risks and safety issues. The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Safety , 30 (10), 543-550.
Shlaes, D. M., Gerding, D. N., John Jr, J. F., Craig, W. A., Bornstein, D. L., Duncan, R. A., ... & Levy, S. (1997). Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America and Infectious Diseases Society of America Joint Committee on the Prevention of Antimicrobial Resistance: guidelines for the prevention of antimicrobial resistance in hospitals. Clinical Infectious Diseases , 25 (3), 584-599.
