The Patient Safety Risks (Essay Sample)

Patient safety risks
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Patient safety risks
Hospitals are charged with the duties of the upkeep of the patients as well as keeping them safe. The dual task is liked since patient safety, in some way, is parallel to patient health concerns. Some of the examples of the concerns a hospital should be aware of are the patients' hygiene, transitions of care and errors due to medication by hospital professionals (Bogner, 2007). An example of a safety issue concern in the recent years is the Ebola outbreak in 2014 where two nurses contracted the virus while taking care of an infected patient (Gosbeee, 2005). This shows the unpreparedness against the mishaps of diseases like these. It is, therefore, important to look into the patient safety issues, even if some are long established, though they will remain at the forefront of healthcare professionals in the upcoming days (Grol, 2001).
There are different sets of healthcare organizations with their respective groups of patients like the geriatric patients, pediatric patients, dental and orthopedic patients (The joint commission, 2010). Each of these patients require professional care from the healthcare settings they acquired their treatment. Since the patients are exposed to risks, they require risk management from the relevant healthcare settings. In the following essay, I shall look into the risks that the dental patients concur and how the risks can be managed.
The NHSN is an Internet-based surveillance system that looks into the patient and healthcare personnel safety issues and the safety surveillance systems (Gosbeee, 2005) which are managed by the Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion (DHQP) at the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) (Bates, 2003: CDC, 2015). NHSN is also important in allowing healthcare sets to track blood safety errors and other vital healthcare processes such as influenza vaccine status to the healthcare personnel. NHSN is, therefore, important in taking care of patient safety situations.
One of the patient safety risks in the current healthcare settings is the diagnostic error (Bates, 2003). Diagnostic errors are the most costly forms of negative medical practices (Bogner, 2007). Being the most common safety risks in healthcare settings, they cause severe issues to patients (Grol, 2001). An example to prove how diagnostic errors are costly is a report by Johns Hopkins Medical Center in 2013, where about 8 percent of medical malpractice payouts exceeding $1 million from 2004 to 2010 with misdiagnoses being the biggest contributors in the percentage (Akanksha, 2014). Misdiagnoses are the most common issues in radiology services in hospitals due to radiology's substandard operating models. There are no any set practice standards to guide the quality of radiology services until a better clinical operating system is set. It is, therefore, important to look into diagnostic errors
Dr. Gandhi says that errors due to diagnosis were a key issue at NPSF's Patient Safety Awareness Week 2014 (Akanksha, 2014: The joint commission, 2010). These errors may be prevalent before people even realize them. The negatives of the misdiagnoses outweigh the people's thoughts of its prevalence since they can result in failure to take the appropriate tests and unavailability of patients for the tests. Diagnostic errors are surely complex errors (Bogner, 2007), which even undone communications, such as patients' realization of the importance of the tests and patients not availing themselves for the tests, could encourage the occurrence of a diagnostic case.
Some of the influences regarding the diagnosis errors are; giving the wrong medicine to a patient inadvertently and a clinician misreading or interpreting the results of a test, causing the issue of the wrong prescription and diagnostics (Bogner, 2007). Another influence of the errors due to diagnosis is maybe ambiguous symptoms of heart attack that are not diagnosed immediately by the emergency staff. This may lead to the wrong errors in diagnosis, and when the symptoms become more than before, it may make the situation difficult for the healthcare professionals to identify the kind of disease.
A High-Reliability Organization is an important organization that avoids disasters even if they are at a high-risk field where accidents are common due to their complexity. Of the recent days, healthcare organizations are known to be adapting the high-reliability organization mindset (Grol, 2001). Some of the insights gained from having this kind of organization are non-avoidance of failure to prevent tragedy and reluctance to simplify by neglecting the small cases and getting the root causes of the large cases affecting the organization (Bates, 1993). HROs are also sensitive to operations and committed to resilience. The application of the HRO model in an organization is achieved simply by adaptation (Hitchings, 2008). Healthcare organizations who adapt to the system, have the advantages of the insights caused by the model.
There are strategies, which if followed, may reduce the chances of the spread of certain risks like the diagnostic errors. Among the strategies and tools that can be used to assess and reduce the risks regarding diagnostic errors is incident reporting (Bogner, 2007). Once we hear about events that the healthcare professionals identify as having the ability to cause harm or affect service delivery, the cases should be reported to the relevant departments (Bates, 1993). Incidents determine the frequency that the event could happen again to produce a risk score (Hitchings, 2008). Usually, the frequencies about diagnostic errors are high, and this is important in making the healthcare professionals to control the errors and enhance monitoring to make sure that the risk is taken care of easily and fast. Incident reporting is important in having the number of reports increasing over time.
Another strategy in making a successful reduction of the spread of the risks is an investigation of the incident; taking a cause analysis. Regardless of any harm, a cause analysis should be made. Cause analysis is important in providing opportunities to look at the causes of the event and know why the event occurred. The findings are important as they enable the arrangement of lessons to teach people how to take relevant action in reducing the incidents of the occurrence of diagnosis errors again.
Emergency planning is also an important strategy for reducing the chances of occurrence and spread of diagnostic errors. Emergency planning ensures that there are the business continuity plans for the reduction of the disruption of services in case of a major occurrence of an incident like the Ebola case. The aim of making an emergency plan is to enh