Patient Safety and Communication

Study Notes

Patient identification errors are a significant safety risk in healthcare, causing harm to patients and compromising care quality.
Wrong-patient incidents occur frequently during medication administration, with studies indicating that these errors can be reduced through proper patient identification procedures.

Effective handoff communication from hospital to home can be improved through the development and implementation of personalized patient discharge letters.
Patient portals can be improved by:
- Ensuring accessibility on various devices
- Providing real-time clinical notes and diagnostic testing results
- Explaining test results directly in the portal
- Offering easy access to support services
- Providing personalized or contextual information to help patients understand test results
- Establishing consensus and standards for releasing normal and abnormal test results

Areas of focus for diagnostic errors include:
- Screening and diagnostic radiology
- Pathology
- Laboratory testing (infectious disease/microbiology, newborn disease screenings, and results indicative of disease processes)
- Care coordination (delayed communication, patient return after being seen, and patient appointments)

Patient participation may not be possible in certain situations, such as:
- Patients who are not competent to make healthcare decisions
- Children
- Patients requiring emergent surgery
The hospital should have a procedure for identifying the correct site in cases where site marking may cause harm or when a patient refuses site marking.

The hospital should implement a preoperative verification process using a checklist or other mechanism to document:
- Verification of informed consent
- Correct patient, procedure, and site
- Presence of required documents, blood products, medical equipment, and implantable medical devices
The hospital should use an instantly recognizable and unambiguous mark for identifying the surgical/invasive site.