6 Ways Hospitals Ensure Patient Safety While Receiving Treatment
- Enforce strict disinfection protocols.
- Use advanced monitoring equipment.
- Verify all medical procedures.
- Observe care in handling medicines.
- Review staffing policies.
- Work with trusted providers.
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Why is it important to ensure patient safety?
Patient Safety
The occurrence of adverse events due to unsafe care is likely one of the 10 leading causes of death and disability in the world (1). In high-income countries, it is estimated that one in every 10 patients is harmed while receiving hospital care (2). The harm can be caused by a range of adverse events, with nearly 50% of them being preventable (3). Each year, 134 million adverse events occur in hospitals in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), due to unsafe care, resulting in 2.6 million deaths (4). Another study has estimated that around two-thirds of all adverse events resulting from unsafe care, and the years lost to disability and death (known as disability adjusted life years, or DALYs) occur in LMICs (5). Globally, as many as 4 in 10 patients are harmed in primary and outpatient health care. Up to 80% of harm is preventable. The most detrimental errors are related to diagnosis, prescription and the use of medicines (6). In OECD countries, 15% of total hospital activity and expenditure is a direct result of adverse events (2). Investments in reducing patient harm can lead to significant financial savings, and more importantly better patient outcomes (2). An example of prevention is engaging patients, if done well, it can reduce the burden of harm by up to 15% (6).
Patient Safety is a health care discipline that emerged with the evolving complexity in health care systems and the resulting rise of patient harm in health care facilities. It aims to prevent and reduce risks, errors and harm that occur to patients during provision of health care.
A cornerstone of the discipline is continuous improvement based on learning from errors and adverse events. Patient safety is fundamental to delivering quality essential health services. Indeed, there is a clear consensus that quality health services across the world should be effective, safe and people-centred.
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In addition, to realize the benefits of quality health care, health services must be timely, equitable, integrated and efficient. To ensure successful implementation of patient safety strategies; clear policies, leadership capacity, data to drive safety improvements, skilled health care professionals and effective involvement of patients in their care, are all needed.
What to do before touching a patient?
The 5 Moments of Hand Hygiene The 5 Moments for hand Hygiene approach defines the key moments when healthcare staff should perform hand hygiene. In order to prevent the patient from being colonized with healthcare-associated microorganisms, hand hygiene must take place before touching the patient or entering the patient zone. The patient zone contains the patient and his/her immediate surroundings, including surfaces touched by the patient (such as the bed rails, infusion tubing) and surfaces frequently touched by staff (such as monitors, knobs and buttons). Before performing a clean/aseptic procedure, hand hygiene is critical in order to prevent HCAI. Hand hygiene should take place between the last exposure to a surface and immediately before access to a critical site with infectious risk for the patient or a critical site with combined infectious risk. Examples: Before wound dressing, catheter insertion, preparation of food, medications. After performing a task associated with a risk to expose hands to body fluids, hand hygiene must take place instantly and before a new hand-to-surface exposure, even if you stay within the patient zone. This action reduces both your risk of being colonized or infected by infectious agents, and the risk of transmitting microorganisms from a “colonized” to a “clean” body site within the same patient. After touching the patient and before touching an object in the area outside of the patient, hand hygiene is important to minimize the risk of dissemination to the healthcare environment. This action also protects you by significantly reducing contamination of your hands with the flora from the patient. Examples: After shaking hands, helping a patient to move around, clinical examination. The final moment for hand hygiene occurs between hand exposure to a surface in the patient zone and a subsequent hand exposure to a surface in the area outside of the patient – but without touching the patient. Hand hygiene is required in this moment since exposure to patient objects, even without physical contact with the patients, is associated with hand contamination. For E-learnings and other educational material about Skin Health and Hand Hygiene. Please contact us at 866-722-8675 : The 5 Moments of Hand Hygiene
What is patient safety culture?
Definition of Patient Safety Culture – Patient safety culture is the extent to which an organization’s culture supports and promotes patient safety. It refers to the values, beliefs, and norms that are shared by healthcare practitioners and other staff throughout the organization that influence their actions and behaviors.
What is safe patient centered care?
Introduction and background – It has been 18 years since Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) in its 2001 seminal report Crossing the Quality Chasm recognized person-centered care as a domain of healthcare quality, Person-centered care (also known as patient-centeredness) requires “providing care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs, and values and ensuring that (these) values guide all clinical decisions”,
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) in its report Crossing the Global Quality Chasm: Improving the Healthcare Worldwide, noted the overall experience of patients in healthcare systems as levels of dissatisfaction varying 2.2%-54.3% globally, The Lancet Global Health Commission, in its report High-Quality Health Systems in the Sustainable Development Goals Era: Time for a Revolution, revealed that an average of 34% of people in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) reported poor user experience when came in contact with their respective healthcare systems,
For high-income countries (OECD), an age standardized rate of 81.3 per 100 patients was reported on doctor providing easy-to-understand explanations, It is clear that globally there is an increasing awareness and action among the healthcare stakeholders to improve the patient-centeredness; however, there is ambiguity on what it actually means, or how-to best measure this in a standardized fashion,
- This has also led to variability in strategies used to collect data on patient-centeredness ranging from patient experience surveys to the patient-reported outcome measures.
- Patient-centeredness is a critical component of quality healthcare and also strongly linked with the safety of healthcare delivery amongst other dimensions of healthcare quality.
Therefore, healthcare organizations and health systems need to develop more applicable, standardized, and effective patient engagement strategies.
