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
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.,