The publication of To Err Is Human was a watershed moment for healthcare history, as it brought the problem of patient safety to the public. This milestone encouraged the development of numerous standards and interventions that helped improve patient safety. Wachter (2010) wrote that five years after the milestone publication, the improvements were tremendous. Agencies developed appropriate regulations, created incentives for health information technology growth, emphasized malpractice systems and promoted workplace training. By 2010, the enthusiasm about the changes decreased, as Wachter (2010) gave a B- to the overall development in patient safety in the US. Today, the risks of patient safety remain high despite of a wide variety of developed practices, interventions, and policies (Bates & Singh, 2018). While the number of hospital-acquired infections decreased tremendously, the occurrence of other preventable adverse hospital events remains high (Bates & Singh, 2018). The primary focus in patient safety is on increasing of availability of data concerning the frequency and the type of risks for each patient to be able to forecast the probability of risks for different types of patients in the future (Bates & Singh, 2018).
In my practice as a nurse, I felt a significant change in patient safety since the report. For instance, of the common errors was using wrong blood types for the transfusion. In my workplace, the problem was addressed by implementing a barcode system. Every nurse needs to scan a barcode on a patient’s wrist and on the blood container. This standardized procedure allowed the hospital to decrease the frequency of wrong transfusions, which led to significant improvements in patient safety. Even though I was forced to follow this new procedure, which increased the work burden, I started to feel more protected from mistakenly giving the wrong blood type to patients.
References
Bates, D. W., & Singh, H. (2018). Two decades since to err is human: an assessment of progress and emerging priorities in patient safety. Health Affairs, 37(11), 1736-1743.
Wachter, R. M. (2010). Patient safety at ten: unmistakable progress, troubling gaps. Health Affairs, 29(1), 165-173.