A patient is the client of any medical facility. Patients’ safety is a priority in medical practice and translates into the patient experience. If you’re a worker in the medical industry, it’s good to bring into the picture your patients when it comes to safety and help them understand how they can be part of patient safety protocols and support such initiatives.
It’s estimated that about 444, 000 people die as a result of avoidable hospital errors. However, if care providers, consumers, and support staff unite their efforts, patient safety can be improved further. In situations wherein the patient is unable to take part in the safety initiatives because of their critical health status, their safety lies precisely in the services of the medical professional.
This article explores 11 strategies that you can use in a medical facility to boost the safety of your patients within the rooms:
1. Employ Particle Counting Measures
Particle counting is a safety measure that hospitals use to control indoor spaces, especially in theatres. Controlling, monitoring, and verifying is critical not just to pass the strict inspections, but to keep the safety and health of your patients and staff. Understanding particle counting is a requirement for every medical practitioner. It uses a particle counter that works on the principle of light blocking or light scattering. Aerosol beams are drawn through a chamber having a light source, which is either white light or laser-based light. The moment a particle gets illuminated by the beams of light, it gets absorbed or redirected.
2. Reduce Hospital Readmissions
There are several tactics that you can use to lower the rates of hospital readmission. This may include providing enough nursing staff for in-patient care, giving clear discharge instructions, making the transition of care better, taking part in readmission-prevention collaborations, targeted treatment of at-risk populations, and taking part in incentive programs with payers.
3. Confirm Every Medical Procedure
Many mistakes happen in medical facilities that put to risk the lives of patients. For example, a patient may be scheduled to have an operation for their right kidney, only to end up having their left kidney operated on. Then, the situation of the patient worsens, only to realize later on that a wrong operation procedure was done. This has a double negative impact on the patient. They lose their money, and, also, their health may have come to an irreparable state. Also, a patient may have the wrong tooth extracted, which is usually a big error.
Before a surgical procedure is done, a member of the surgical team needs to call the rest of the team to order and go through the details of the surgery. Verification should be done in other aspects, such as medicine dosage, timing, and confirming that a medical officer thoroughly followed handwashing procedures.
4. Lower Adverse Drug Events
To avoid adverse drug events, you need to carefully do medication reconciliation. You may consider having a computerized provider order entry. Moreover, make use of double checks, Tall Man letters, standard order sets, and leading zeros. Ensure that you avoid trailing zeros and “Do Not Use’ abbreviations.
5. Re-Engineer Hospital Discharges
Well-structured hospital discharges have the potential to bring down readmissions. You may need to appoint an employee who should work closely with your patients and staff so that they can reconcile medications and undertake appropriate follow-up medical appointments. Your medical facility should adopt a simple-to-understand discharge protocol for all your patients, have a follow-up medication schedule for upcoming medical appointments, and tell your patients how they can contact the facility when a problem emerges.
6. Educate Patients On Safe Use Of Blood Thinners
When patients have undergone surgery in your hospital and have been discharged, they’re prescribed a blood thinner, such as the warfarin brand that helps them prevent having blood clots. If the prescriptions aren’t used the right way, it may result in persistent bleeding, which endangers the life of the patient. Your facility can have educative videos of about 10 minutes and give a booklet containing relevant instructions that the patient can refer back to when using these medicines.
7. Partner With Patient Safety Organizations
Patient safety organizations (PSOs) offer confidentiality and privileges that establish the right environment, which helps come up with quality formats for collecting, analyzing, and aggregating data. Such measures boost the quality of services, as well as identify and reduce patient care-related hazards and risks.
8. Adopt Teamwork And Rapid Response Systems
Develop and cultivate a teamwork culture of your hospital staff. You can craft a tool for your hospital, or use customizable tools that give you a basic structure for advancing effective communication, coupled with many other teamwork skills to advance collaboration of staff from different units. Educate them on how to respond in case of an emergency. You may tailor your facility guidelines for the emergency department and ambulatory clinics.
9. Adopt A Safety Compliance Plan
Put measures in place that enable you to evaluate and monitor how your workers are following the laid down policies. Your governing board should use this plan to adjust or put emphasis on the policies. Compliance guidelines can help your facility in the following ways:
∙ Offers a centralized point of compliance
∙ Boosts the trust of the community towards your organization
∙ Increases successful treatment results
∙ It’s the basis for the vendor and employee evaluation checklist
∙ Guards your organization from illegal activities
∙ Maintains the integrity of insurance claims
10. Have A Safe Hospital Design
Before good hospital designs were adopted, traditional designs were focusing on operations rather than the safety of patients. When you’re building a medical facility, you should have a patient-centred mentality of the structural design. This includes features such as air quality, noise dampening, critical data proximity, fixtures for contagion spread reduction, like hand sinks, and standardized feature locations.
Modern technology allows your engineers to design a hospital that incorporates advanced technology, which reduces human error by the use of intelligent systems, with a keen emphasis on drug dispensaries.
11. Curb Blood Infections In The Central Line
Be extra alert to prevent infections from occurring in the central line bloodstream. Religiously follow the following steps whenever you insert a central venous catheter: clean your hands, have full barrier precautions, wash the skin using chlorhexidine, keep away femoral lines, and remove all unnecessary lines. It’s advised that following these steps can lower these kinds of infections to nearly zero levels.
Conclusion
Patient safety ought to be a priority in your hospital. This is a collective responsibility of your staff and the patients. Ensure that you incorporate measures, such as indoor particle counting, reduce the number of readmissions, have a compliance safety plan, and design your hospital in such a way that it has a clear safety design.
