Health Medical Homework Help

Reply back to 2 post each with 175 words  each and 2 citations.

Post #1

It is crucial for health care organizations to provide health care that demonstrates quality and safety. Quality health care encompass desired health outcomes that is uniformed with current professional knowledge. The Institute of Medicines’ report on To Err Is Human found that the bulk of medical errors are caused by faulty processes and systems. Processes and systems that are inefficient can lead to an intricate healthcare system. Based on these factors, The Institute of Medicine placed six goals for healthcare which includes safe, timely, efficient, effective, patient-centered, and equitable. The objective for assessing health care quality is to discover healthcare delivery and its impact on desired outcomes and to evaluate whether healthcare is following processes that is evidenced based. Moreover, it is important to implement multiple process improvement strategies to detect preventable errors, inefficiencies, and ineffective care in order to implement change. Organizations such as the Joint Commission, The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the National Quality Forum support utilizing measures that are valid and reliable to evaluate safety and quality to promote an improvement in health care (Hughes, 2008).  

With my current healthcare organization, patient safety is priority, as well as providing high quality care. One way that our health care delivery is measured for quality and patient safety is through surveyors from the Joint Commission. Through citations, our health care organization is required to develop a plan to fix the mistakes. Once the plan is complete and before implementation, the staff will be educated and the new policy and plan will be provided at each department for reference. This improves our healthcare system by helping staff to be more cognizant of better ways to deliver healthcare and thus can enhance care, promote safety, and improve patient outcomes. In addition, this can help our healthcare organization to save money through prevention strategies.

Post#2

How does the management of quality drive patient safety in your organization?

The management of quality goals in any organization is the sum and total of how we practice safely. The essence of a High Reliability Organization is not the depth or strength of the Quality Assurance/Compliance department. Healthcare is riddled with inherent risks that can prove hazardous to those entrusted to us for care. There are numerous situations that can result in an error and certainly no error is ever intentional. Errors are an opportunity to examine the causative factors, to conduct a root cause analysis, to determine if the environment, equipment, or human nature contributed to the error and find solutions to mitigate what factors can be changed in order to prevent future errors in a non-punitive but accountable process to reduce the possibility of harm. According to Sherwood and Barnsteiner (2017), “characteristics of organizations have a culture of safety and quality, direct involvement of top and middle leadership, safety and quality efforts aligned with the strategic plan, an established infrastructure for safety, and continuous improvement with (the most important part) active engagement of staff across the organization” (156).

For ambulatory departments, one of the JC National Patient Safety Goals for 2021 in Ambulatory Health Care is patient identification. This may seem so intuitive that why would a nurse fail to correctly identify their patient? Well, it happened to me and I nearly gave the wrong medication before I realized I did not have the right patient in front of me! This national goal has a reason, likely there has been incidents where a patient was misidentified and instead of a “near-miss”, the mistake was compounded by not catching the error in time. How the management of quality drives our organization, I would say, it starts with the individual speaking up for systems and processes that increase risk, pressure for a caregiver to cut a corner or rush to perform a procedure (like drug administration) that started with an error and taking that opportunity to check their practice. Practice drift can be an insidious slippery slop and I have never forgotten this near-miss and what contributed to the event. I can only affect what I do, and how I perform, which is my full and complete responsibility, regardless of the environmental factors. In this case, there is no blame to be levied. This was an error that I made and it gave me the moment of pause to check and correct a drifted practice.

How do you think it is or could improve health care systems? 

I am employed by a health system that is accredited by the Joint Commission (JC) and we are currently preparing for a survey. A few years back, the health system adopted a mantra “survey readiness” which just means that we are ready all the time, not just in preparation for a survey. I have noticed that level of attention is present in each of our daily huddles. What in the department needs to be repaired? How does the workload impact our culture of safety? I am practicing in a small affiliate of a large health system, so we have more access to the affiliate leaders. From time to time, our Chief Nurse Executive will “pop in” and participate in a huddle with us. She wants to know what we are experiencing good, bad and the ugly. She is leading by example to promote a safe and quality culture.