Essay On Patient Safety

Patients can be harmed from health care, resulting in permanent injury, increased lengths of stay in hospital and even death. Over the past 15 years, adverse events occur not because people working in medical professions intentionally hurt patients, but rather due to the complexity of health-care systems, where treatment and care depend on many factors, in addition to the competence of health-care providers. When so many and varied types of health-care providers, such as dentists, dieticians, doctors, midwives, nurses, surgeons, pharmacists, social workers, and others are involved, it can be difficult to ensure safe care, unless the system is designed to facilitate the delivery of quality and safe services. Patient Safety is defined as the reduction of risk of unnecessary harm associated with health care to an acceptable minimum (1).
Since Bernnan et al. (1991) first described the extent of harm to patients; other studies have reported similar results, notwithstanding the differences in their cultures and health systems (2).

Reducing harm caused by health care is a global priority, and there has been a dramatic increase in patient safety improvement efforts over the past decade with the development of science of patient safety (3).In its 1999 report, Journal of American Medical Information Association identified medical error as an important
Traditionally, curricula for doctors and medical students have focused on pure clinical skills, such as diagnosis of illness, treatment of disease, after-care, and follow-up. However, systems thinking, root cause analysis, and application of human factor science and communication skills have been largely overlooked. These skills are fundamental to patient safety, and all undergraduate medical students should have the necessary competence to minimize harm to patients (5,