Improving and maintaining patient safety has been known to be an important task and also difficult for many health organizations. The staff and health care professionals in a healthcare facility have to be involved in activities that include measures that reduce risks to the patient. Poor patient outcomes can be avoided once patient safety, risk prevention, and risk management are provided by the healthcare staff in an organization. The healthcare organization leader’s actions and communication to the health care staff and patients on the safety measures of the patients contribute to a good patient outcome.
Patient safety, risk prevention, and risk management work together to decrease patient harm in different ways. Patient safety and risk management roles are almost similar. They help identify the patient error and correct and improve the activities which will enhance patient safety. Risk management and prevention involve the actions of identifying errors which may prevent the patient from receiving safe and effective care while patient safety includes activities that focus on patient safety through prevention, reduction, reporting and analyzing medical errors which leads to the poor patient outcome (Graban, 2016). Risk can occur in many ways. The main aim of risk management and prevention is to ensure that the risks are identified early, analyzed and solutions of the best ways to manage and control them to reduce poor outcomes. On the other hand, patient safety aims at improvement efforts such as applying the lessons learned on the patient safety, adopting the patient safety measures, educating patients and their families on their safety measures and development of activities which improves patient care (Graban, 2016). The structure and the process of patient safety and risk management offer advantages to the healthcare organization by ensuring the commitment of putting the patients at the centers of health care to receive care from health care professionals who have clear guidance and direction.
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When there is a poor patient outcome, the cause is investigated, analyzed to identify what the issue is and what process can be put in place to improve the patient’s safety. To achieve this, patient safety and risk prevention and management team work together with the health professionals and other areas to identify the risk and therefore providing resources, advice, and support in all aspect of the risk management (Glendon & Clarke, 2015). Patient safety and risk management and prevention work closely to have information on the patient experiences, complains and services which may affect the patient health and therefore identify the cause of harm on the patient. It also involves identifying from patients and their feedback and closely monitoring the organization or system if it’s not working well. Joining patient safety and risk management ensures direct connections with the patient experiences and broader governance (Glendon & Clarke, 2015). It also monitors patients and services of the organization, audit and makes improvements of processes within the organization. In general, patient safety working together with risk management and prevention is crucial because it ensures the clinical and non-clinical risks are managed to ensure patient safety and also the healthcare professionals, patient family, and visitors’ safety.
Patient safety, risk prevention, and risk management mitigate resultant claim in many ways. The primary goal of the process is similar as they identify, they analyze, reduce and control and prevent the clinical risk which causes harm and most importantly is improving the clinical outcome through the organization (Runciman & Walton, 2017). The process is multipurpose and collaborative. This includes the use of incident reporting. Incident reporting ensure adequate capture of events or incidents that the health professionals staff have identified has a possibility of causing harm to the patients or staff or may affect the delivery of services in the organization and the events that occur. The three aspects grade the incidents to reflect the response of the event and the possibility that it could repeatedly happen to cause more risks. If more risk is created, assessment of risk is done. This helps the organization staff in the healthcare facility prioritize the activities they need to do to reduce and also control the risk and support the monitoring process to ensure risk is controlled and managed properly. An effective reporting system ensures having adequate reports on the risks which may pose harm. Finding out the cause of the incidents and why it may have occurred ensures lessons are learned, and actions are taken to control the risk. This, therefore, ensures that the health organization staff are aware of the risks and hence spot risks before it causes harm. Patient safety, risk management, and prevention mitigate harm by generally gives room to look at facts of incidents by investigating, making analyzing of the investigation and then provides solutions of the measures to control and prevent harm on patient, family and the organizational staff. Also, data sources which include the patient and the caregivers' concerns include patients voluntary reporting incidents that occurred, significant events, coded information (claims, write-offs due to service errors, risk, and quality assessment, literature and evidence-based practice and the external alerts) and the external alerts from the international and national sources.
In conclusion, patient safety, risk management, and risk prevention can be done by different teams in a healthcare organization. They are separate section but have almost similar roles. Patient safety, risk management, and risk prevention work together to effectively decrease patient harm from risks which may cause the poor patient outcome.
References
Graban, M. (2016). Lean hospitals: improving quality, patient safety, and employee engagement. CRC press.
Glendon, A. I., & Clarke, S. (2015). Human safety and risk management: A psychological perspective. CRC Press.
Runciman, B., Merry, A., & Walton, M. (2017). Safety and ethics in healthcare: a guide to getting it right. CRC Press.
