Improving Patient Safety

Seisay I completely agree with you that nurses play a vital role in ensuring patient safety, since we all know that patient safety can improve patient outcome and subsequently reduce the cost of healthcare. The culture of safety is a continuously changing concept and focus on preventing medical errors and maintaining patient safety and that when those errors happen, they lead to bad consequences including, increase in length of hospital stay, litigation costs, healthcare-associated infections, lack of income, healthcare associated disabilities and additional healthcare expenses (Ammouri et al., 2014). Since patient safety is and should be an integral part of professional nursing care in order to maintain quality outcome leaders should early on determine and eradicate factors that contribute to the development of those errors
which includes lack of effective communication between all the interdisciplinary personnel, the patients as well as their families, lack of teamwork among the nursing staff, and lack of appropriate leadership skill on the part of the leader as well as inadequate staff knowledge about safety measures.
According to Porter-O’Grady and Malloch’s (2015), error is an essential teacher and at varying levels of complexity, it indicates a break in the confluence and congruity of processes in a way that causes participants to note the break, assess the situation, and the action (Porter-O’Grady &Malloch, 2015). Thus the leadership team should put in place safety measures such as electronic medical records, train their staffs on how to use them and provide frequent in-service education and training and support as well as reassure their staffs that change doesn’t come over night and that with time everything will fall in place.

The good news is that these errors are preventable and can be done so by improving all aspects of patient safety including by adequately monitoring and coordinating the patient plan of care.
Subsequently, since as nurses we spend a good sum of our shift time with our patients, we tend to impact the outcome of the patients more than other interdisciplinary team members. Factors that can prevent medical errors include providing an effective and safe patient care, monitoring quality indicators such as length of hospital stay, re- admission rate and conducting risk assessment. I also agree with you that leaders should play an important role of supporting their associates by putting in place safety measures that will reduce and completely eradicate unnecessary errors in the hospital facilities. According to Ammouri et al., 2014, In order to create a patient safety culture, many factors must be present and these include effective therapeutic communication about medical errors, appropriate staffing, procedure compliance, safe hazard free environment, and ongoing orientation and training for both new and other staff members (Ammouri et al.,
2014).