Nurses Role In Quality And Patient Safety Research (Essay Sample)

Nurses Role in Quality and Safety
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Nurses Role in Quality and Safety
Abstract
In nursing care, patient’s quality care and safety are some of the vital components. However, the nursing care has been faced with many quality and safety issues. These quality and safety issues can be very detrimental to the safe patient care. For patient’s quality care and safety to be effective, there are many stakeholders that are responsible for ensuring that the patients receive quality and safety care, these stakeholders include patient, nurses, administrators and physicians among many others. This paper addresses the role of nurses in quality and safety and safety and quality issues in the United States. The latter part will give recommendations on how to improve safety and quality issues in patient care.
Introduction
Patient safety is one of the vital elements in the nursing care. Studies by Sherwood & Barnsteiner (2012) indicate that nurses face a great challenge nowadays of ensuring that the patient is in a safe environment. Nursing is a knowledge-based profession that involves nursing science, biomedical, ethics, philosophy among other subjects that contributes to patient’s safety and quality. The nurse should be a critical thinker and use the diverse acquired knowledge to ensure the well-being of the patients that are under his/her care.
In her early profession, Nightingale advocated for patients safe care. According to Nightingale, when a patient is kept in a safe condition, nature takes its course and heals the patient. It is very important for the nurses to use the Nightingale traditions and strengthen the patient-nurse relationship. Nurses have a responsibility to provide safe quality care for the patients. Additionally, the nurses have a role in ensuring that they have the skills required in providing safe and quality care. Since nurses are required to make informed decisions concerning the patients, being a lifelong learner is a role that the nurses should take.
Medication error has been one of the most safety and quality issue in the United States that can compromise the safety of the patient. According to Sherwood & Barnsteiner (2012), medication errors affect 6.5% of patients in the United States. Medication errors do not only affect the patient negatively but it also adversely affects the economy since there are annual costs related to adverse effects of medication errors. Medication errors are caused by disruptions and interruptions, inadequate drug calculation skills and inadequate education among many other factors.
The nurses should work extra hard to ensure that they avoid medication errors at all costs. In all healthcare setting, avoiding the medication error requires the physicians to be vigilance and use appropriate technology that make sure that proper approaches are used. The use of technology in drug administration steps can play a major role in the reduction of the medical errors in future. If the hospital among ...