Introduction
This paper is dedicated to the concepts of patient safety and health care quality. The essence of patient safety lies in the prevention of intentional and unintentional harm to the patients. In other words, healthcare personnel should avoid errors, injuries, and assignment of inappropriate treatment. The concept of health care quality is defined by the World Health Organization (2020) as “the degree to which health services for individuals and populations increase the likelihood of desired health outcomes.” The care of high quality is characterized as patient-centered, safe, and effective.
Safety
The topic of patient safety could be exemplified by medical errors, falls, and hospital-acquired infections. One of the most severe nursing errors is the failure to prescribe the proper medication and its dosage. Tariq et al. (2021) reveal that approximately 8,000 Americans die because of medication errors per year. These examples demonstrate that patient safety is an immensely important concept in nursing. Since patient safety is about avoiding harm to patients, medical errors decrease the safety of people who receive treatment in a healthcare setting. That is because a nurse or a physician who commits an error puts the life of a patient in danger. However, nursing errors are preventable. According to Marques (2018), the best ways of error prevention are teamwork, communication, notification of mistakes, and training.
Falls and hospital-acquired infections also pose a danger to the well-being of a patient and could seriously harm the healing process. These two examples signify that patient safety is not only about the professionalism, skills, and knowledge of medical personnel. Patient safety also means the creation of a safe and aseptic environment that minimizes the chances of a potential injury, fall, or infection. In order not to harm patients and not exacerbate their conditions, it is necessary to be able to predict what could go wrong and how to mitigate these potential issues.
Health Care Quality
One of the components of health care of high quality is patient-centered care. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (2018) defines such care as “Respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs, and values and ensuring that patient values guide all clinical decisions.” Additionally, health care quality depends on whether a nurse has managed to establish communication and trusting relations with a patient. The ideas of health care quality and patient-centered care are closely related to patient satisfaction. Indeed, the easiest way to estimate the quality of the care is to ask a patient whether the treatment outcomes and the behavior and actions of nurses and doctors met his expectations.
Other examples related to healthcare quality include nursing informatics and TeamSTEPPS. Nursing informatics combines nursing with information technology because electronic health records, bed management systems, and AI helps control the state of a patient’s health, monitor his progress, and make more precise diagnoses faster. TeamSTEPPS is a framework that assists in optimizing the performance of healthcare workers and consists of developing skills in communication, leadership, situation monitoring, and support. These two examples significantly improve the treatment outcomes.
Effect of the Concepts
Clinical judgment involves knowledge and skills accumulation and their application in practice with the goal of improving patient outcomes. Patient outcomes, in turn, depend on the safety and quality of healthcare services. Thus, nurses advance their clinical practice by learning from studies and previous mistakes to provide patient safety and healthcare of high quality.
Emerging Health Initiatives
Safety
Many health initiatives have recently emerged in the sphere of patient safety provision. For example, to deal with the over-and under-dosage of medications, nurses could employ intravenous smart pumps and medication dispensing stations. The probability of patient falls could be reduced by installing specialized beds and non-slip shoes, the floor, and thestairs. One of the initiatives aimed at lowering healthcare-acquired infections cases is the education of healthcare personnel according to antimicrobial stewardship programs.
Quality
In recent years there are also a lot of innovations that have increased healthcare quality. For instance, the integration of information retrieved from biomedical devices in electronic medical records is one of the manifestations of nursing informatics. This innovation ensures that specialists can constantly access the relevant patient data. Nursing documentation and interdisciplinary care plans improve communication and facilitate cooperation between hospital employees. Finally, the most recent trends in healthcare are personalization of care and virtual care (Martin, 2021). These two innovations increase patients’ satisfaction and provide them with the best treatment possible.
Advancement of Workplace Communication
Effective workplace communication is necessary for the decent performance of healthcare workers and the high quality of the provided care. On the slide, you could use four strategies that could help to advance communication between the hospital’s staff members.
Conclusion
The paper provides a comprehensive overview of patient safety and healthcare quality concepts. It also discusses ways to improve patient satisfaction, the efficiency of care, and communication between colleagues in a hospital.
References
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality [AHRQ](2018). Six domains of health care quality. Web.
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Marques, T. V. R. (2018). Strategies for an effective safety culture and prevent errors in nursing: Literature. International Journal of Nursing, 5(1), 25-32. Web.
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Tariq, R. A., Vashisht, R., & Scherbak, Y. (2021). Medication errors. StatPearls Publishing.
World Health Organization (2020). Quality health services. Web.