Patient Safety and Hospital Regulation

Patient Safety and Hospital Regulation

• Patient safety is a fundamental aspect of delivering quality healthcare, aiming to prevent and reduce risks, errors, and harm to patients during healthcare provision.
• Continuous improvement is a cornerstone of patient safety, based on learning from errors and adverse events.

Definition of Patient Safety

• Patient safety is the avoidance of unintended or unexpected harm to people during the provision of healthcare.

Causes of Patient Harm

• Medication errors
• Healthcare-associated infections
• Unsafe surgical care procedures
• Unsafe injections practices
• Diagnostic errors
• Unsafe transfusion practices
• Sepsis
• Radiation errors
• Venous thromboembolism (blood clots)

National Patient Safety Goals (NPSG)

• Identify patients correctly using at least two ways to verify identity (e.g., name and date of birth).
• Improve staff communication to develop processes for reporting critical test results in a timely fashion.
• Use medicines safely by clearly labeling medications, keeping detailed records, and providing written documentation to patients.
• Use alarms safely by improving medical equipment alarms to ensure quick response.
• Prevent infection by following hand cleaning guidelines from CDC or WHO.
• Identify patient safety risks, such as suicidal ideations, and mitigate them through environmental risk assessments and screening tools.
• Prevent mistakes in surgery by verifying the correct surgery, patient, and body site.

Patient Safety Program

• A patient safety program can be categorized into four domains:
  • Ensuring compliance with patient safety regulations (e.g., patient identification, timely response to critical tests, and appropriate use of clinical alarms).
  • Responding to adverse events through root cause analyses and targeted corrective actions.
  • Applying evidence-based risk reduction strategies (e.g., Pay for Performance and Public Reporting).
  • Pay for performance programs use financial incentives to reward hospitals that perform well on pre-established safety and quality measures.

Learn about the importance of patient safety in healthcare, its definition, and causes of patient harm. Improve your knowledge on providing quality care and reducing risks.