The healthcare sector is expected to carry out deliberate steps to promote workplace safety. The safety of the healthcare sector ensures protection and positive patient outcomes at every stage of the patient's treatment. Needless to say, a sound safety and health management system is one that promotes the safety of all patients, employees, and users of the facility. When a healthcare workplace has got a safety culture, the caregivers can speak out candidly about possible errors, near errors, and even actual harm caused (Van Nunen, 2018). Importantly, these challenges are resolved systematically and objectively when and if they occur. Maintaining a safety culture in the healthcare workplace is crucial because it prevents the spread of diseases and promotes medication safety at the workplace.
Prevention of the spread of infections
A healthcare facility must ensure the safety of all persons from infectious diseases. Notably, such facilities are the place where everyone runs to when they have illnesses and symptoms of illnesses to get treatment. These same facilities also receive guests and have numerous caregivers attending to the patients. The facility management must ensure that the institution is safe at all times. This means implementing measures that curb the spread of opportunistic and infectious diseases (Mayhall, 2012). The safety management system should ensure there is minimal to no, patient to patient, patient to caregiver or caregiver to other patient infections.
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Most infectious diseases are airborne, and can also be spread through contact with body fluids and blood (Mayhall, 2012). The spread of such diseases can be prevented by adhering to high standards of hygiene, safe contact measures, and patient isolation (Mayhall, 2012). Maintaining personal hygiene is crucial in the prevention of the spread of infectious diseases. This means that people should be encouraged to wash their hands frequently using soap, water, and sanitizers. They should equally wash their bodies and clothes whenever possible or when in contact with contaminated surfaces and infected persons. Infections can also be minimized if the facility's floors, walls, and surfaces are frequently cleaned using soap, disinfectors, and clean water. Infections are further minimized by isolating infected persons and minimizing their contact with others (Van Nunen, 2018).
Patients come and go, but healthcare caregivers and employees are around for a long time. Subsequently, the management of such facilities must instill confidence in their employees through a sound safety and health management system. When workers are confident that the management cares for their safety, the safety of the patient and users of the facility, they are inclined to support the management efforts to promote a safe working environment (Van Nunen, 2018). This support should be evident in the safety policies, implementation, and evaluation process (Mayhall, 2012). Further, the management should ensure that they provide protective working gear as well as a safe working space. Such a facility needs to have an infectious disease isolation area to curb, minimize, or eliminate further infection at the workplace. This effort will save lives as well as shield the facility against legal liability to its workers and other facility users (Mayhall, 2012).
Safety of patients with medication
Another key area of safety in any healthcare facility is in the administration of patient medication. Many errors have been witnessed in drug administration to patients occasioned by human error or a weak medical system (Donaldson et al., 2017). Human factors include caregivers fatigue, excessive workload, or machine errors such as faulty drug dispensers. Such errors and factors lead to the wrong administration of drugs, the wrong time, or the wrong dosage of medication to patients (Donaldson et al., 2017). Such mistakes have, in the past, worsened the patient's health condition, lead to disability, and, in some instances, ended up in fatality. Proper administration of drugs is the responsibility of both the patient and caregiver (Donaldson et al., 2017).
References
Donaldson, L. J., Kelley, E. T., Dhingra-Kumar, N., Kieny, M. P., & Sheikh, A. (2017). Medication without harm: WHO's third global patient safety challenge. The Lancet , 389 (10080), 1680-1681.
Mayhall, C. G. (2012). Hospital epidemiology and infection control . Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
Van Nunen, K., Li, J., Reniers, G., & Ponnet, K. (2018). Bibliometric analysis of safety culture research. Safety science , 108 , 248-258.
