Quality and Safety in Health Care Research Assignment (Essay Sample)

Quality and Safety in Health Care
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Quality and Safety in Health Care
Quality, in connection to healthcare services, is the magnitude to which healthcare products and services produce desired outcomes. Quality improvement constitutes of continuous and systematic actions that result in measurable enhancement in healthcare services and status of patient groups (Vincent, 2010). Quality service delivery is important for the safety of patients, with health organizations implementing various initiatives that address quality care. Quality delivery of healthcare services denotes the combined efforts of all employers to meet various organizational goals, requiring individuals to address safety issues as an attempt to promote safety standards in healthcare delivery (Treas & Wilkinson, 2013). Advocacy for client safety, in attempts to ensure quality improvement of healthcare services requires assertiveness of skill. Improvement of standards means changing practices of services delivery, including changing management practices and strategies that are incorporated in change management (Saba, 2012).
The World Health Organization defines patient safety as the absence of harm to patients during healthcare (Kohn, 2010). Patient safety is coordinated with the attempts to prevent harm that is caused by healthcare processes. Patient safety, assured through quality improvement, is attained by initial comprehension of an organization's key processes and delivery system (Children’s Health Queensland Hospital and Health Service, 2013). At the core basis, quality improvement constitutes team efforts, through harnessing knowledge, experience, skills, and perspectives of various individuals.
Quality improvement programs constitute systematic activities organized and executed by organizations to assess and improve the quality of healthcare (Children’s Health Queensland Hospital and Health Service, 2013). It consists of all the activities within a healthcare organization, with clinically initiated activities that improve the operations of an organization. The creation of a quality improvement program has the benefits of; improving patients' clinical and general outcomes, improving efficiency of clinical and managerial process, and avoiding costs associated with errors, process failures, and poor outcomes (AIHW, 2014).
Process and outcome data is collected for different clinical care activities with the aim of improving the clinical care activities. For instance, process and outcome data collected in pediatric ward recorded a substantial numbers of children falling in the pediatric wards. Pediatric activity is concerned with taking care of children aged between 0 years to 17 years (Saba, 2012). The falls were recorded to occur at night or with collisions with objects at night, or during the day. According to Kohn, outcome data shows that falls in pediatric wards lead to injuries to 5% of the patients admitted to the wards (2010). The process data collected from the wards indicates that poor organization mainly causes the falls in the wards. To improve quality and safety in pediatric wards in the health care institutions, various health institutions were advised to; install proper light...