Discussion Question Paper
Discussion Question
Healthcare organizations ought to establish the culture of safety in their daily practice. However, due to the fact that healthcare providers are trained in different institutions and thus have unique experiences, it is important to have standardized modes of practice. The standardization enhances equal access to quality healthcare services. For example, fall and medication errors among the common issues encountered in our organization. As a result, there are standards on what healthcare organizations should do to reduce the incidences of medication errors and falls. In cases of falls, the standardization requires that healthcare organization assess the risk of falls through the provided checklist. Such helps in improving the quality of care offered as well as putting the healthcare providers in an equal position to perform the assessment because they are guided by a common tool (McLachlan et al., 2020).
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The standards are critical in strengthening the confidence of the healthcare providers to offer quality care to the patients. The healthcare providers improve their competencies as they continuously interact with the standards thus making it easy for them to deliver the best care to the patients (Wu et al., 2018). On contrary, lack of standards means that every healthcare provider will do what they think is right and end up offering substandard quality of care in some cases. Furthermore, the standards make it easy for the healthcare providers to develop corrective actions to the mistakes they make and thus improve the quality of care patient’s delivery. Standardizations are not only applicable to the practice, but also, the way healthcare providers ought to be trained. Having such policies promote better health outcomes and the culture of safety in the healthcare institutions.
References
McLachlan, S., Kyrimi, E., Dube, K., Hitman, G., Simmonds, J., & Fenton, N. (2020). Towards standardisation of evidence-based clinical care process specifications. Health Informatics Journal, 26(4), 2512-2537. https://doi.org/10.1177/1460458220906069
Wu, L., Ji, C., Lu, H., Hong, X., Liu, S., Zhang, Y., Li, Q., Huang, S., Zhou, P., Yao, J., & Hu, Y. (2018). Standardization of medical service indicators: A useful technique for hospital administration. PLOS ONE, 13(11), e0207214. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0207214
The Joint Commission has pushed patient safety to a new level through their National Patient Safety Goals. How many of your organizations are Joint Commission accredited? We are seeing a decrease in this certification due to enhanced Medicare criteria and increasing costs of accreditation.
However, regardless of setting, the published National Patient Safety Goals provide clear evidence and direction on common areas of patient safety issues and how to prevent them.
For example, regardless of our settings, we have a potential for patient falls. If we go to the Joint Commission website, we can look at best practices to prevent falls. One standard is: “Staff is competent to consider medication effect in relation to falls. It may not be appropriate or necessary in other settings (e.g., phlebotomy, diagnostic radiology) where the above are not the case. In these settings, consideration of gait, balance, cognition, and Environmental factors that may contribute to falls may be more important considerations for a fall reduction program” (The Joint Commission, 2017, para 3).
Class – look at a goal that is an issue in your organization. How would these standards be helpful in improving patient safety?