Healthcare and Patient Safety

Quality and Safety Education for Nurses

Patient safety

The issue of patient safety has been a concern to medics and the stakeholders in the health care system over many years. This has been propelled by constant emergence of life threatening injures to people visiting or working within the healthcare facilities s well as construction of buildings and entrances that do not meet the required standards of hospitals. This largely informs the basis of this paper to find out where the wrongs are and how these can be rectified to provide a good environment for patients.

Patient safety

The patient safety is as important as the rescue of the life of a patient when he walks into the hospital to seek medical attention. The nurses and doctors are hence required to adhere to the call of the Nursing and Midwifery Council of "Nurses and nursing staff manage risk, are vigilant about risk, and help to keep everyone safe in the places they receive health care" (Royal College of Nursing, 2014). The nurses are therefore required to ensure they curb infections, identify the patients correctly, use the medicines at their disposal correctly, avoid surgical errors at all costs, prevent venous thromboembolism (VTE), customize the discharges from the hospital, hospital should use good hospital designs to avoid falls and accidents, hospital should assemble netter teams and rapid response systems, share essential data for quality improvement and foster and open communication system, all these factors geared towards ensuring the total safety of the patients (Kreimer S. 2014). There are however some unsafe practices that are experienced in the nursing fraternity that contributes to the unsafe environment like the workarounds that weaken the set procedures, dangerous abbreviations that would lead to wrong treatment, inappropriate interaction with patients, poor work ethics and generally inability to follow instructions and safety (Florence L., et.al., 2008). There are however emerging technologies that can make it possible to eliminate some of these errors by storing data of clients and matching them with prescriptions and all the necessary information to avoid misidentifications. These technologies include barcodes, Computer Provider Order Entry and even the electronic prescribing of drugs.

To improve the safety skills within the nursing fraternity, there is need to have a standard checklist that is appended to each unit and each patient to avoid workarounds. There is also need to ensure that there are forcing functions implemented by eliminating any drugs that are not prescribed for the treatment of a given patient from his room, there needs to be standardization of treatment procedures to ensure that there is no step that is bypassed by the nurses hence ensuring the proper treatment of the patients and their safety as well. There is also need to have a well drafted shift exchange between the incoming lot and the outgoing lot. The outgoing lot needs to wait for the incoming lot until they come and must as well explain to them their activity of the day in details and how far they have reached with a given patient, any special reactions that need to be take care of and the changes in health status if any, be they positive or negative.

It is of high significance and importance for hospitals to have standardizations in every department in order to make the practice of the nurses and doctors therein to be of the required levels. This will ensure there is high reliability in the treatment that each patient is given since the procedure used is not personal approach but a given standard and also will ensure safety of patients as this standardization will eliminate any human errors that would be common in places where there are no set standards to be followed and adhered to. It is important to note that in any profession, what get measured gives results and the safety standards that a hospital institutes are the ones that will help in ensuring there is delivery of quality and high standard treatment.