Patient Safety – How to Prevent Mistakes

Bulletproof hospital policy increases patient safety

One of the biggest issues hospitals face is patient safety: making sure that every step a nurse or doctor takes is done correctly. There are many mistakes that can be made by doctors and nurses alike, and a lack of communication between staff can result in some extremely bad outcomes for patients. This article will take a look at some ways that you can improve the quality of patient care that you are providing at your hospital.

Hospital policy

The first thing that I would like to talk about here is hospital policy. If you don’t have hospital policy in place, it is critical that you get one put into place. Hospital policy should contain all of the standards and guidelines that you have put together in order to ensure that everyone in your hospital has the best possible chance of being safe and healthy.

High-quality staffing

The second thing we are going to take a look at is the type of staff that you have. The staff that you have working in your hospital will impact how patient safety is managed. Different types of staff will need different levels of supervision in order to ensure that mistakes are kept to a minimum.

For example, if you have an emergency room, then you are going to need more alert/qualified staff, therefore there will need to be more staff to supervise. There are also instances where a nurse might have to check on a patient more than once in order to make sure that everything is alright. You should have a staff member designated as the person who handles these situations in order to keep things running smoothly.

Utilize FMEA

The type of staff member that you have in place should be based off of what type of mistakes you tend to see. For example, nurses often make the most mistakes because they are checking on a patient multiple times in a day. In order to combat this, you should have nurses who are designated as floor nurses. These nurses are only allowed to check on patients in the middle of the night and after hours on weekends and holidays. This ensures that your main nurses are not checking on patients more than necessary.

Proper hospital policy ensures patient safety

When dealing with errors made by nurses, you need to make sure that your policies allow for the nurse to be in charge of who checks on a patient. When checking on a patient, it is not okay for the nurse to check on the same patient more than once or twice.

If the hospital policy states that a nurse must check on the same patient three times in one day, than the nurse needs to be more strict. They must stop by the side of the bed and check if the patient is still breathing. If the patient is not breathing, then they need to bring the patient into another room for further medical care. This is just one example of a mistake that can be easily prevented.

Medical errors

When you work in a medical facility, you have to be on your toes. There are so many things that could go wrong. It only takes one medical error to mess up your day. This means that you need to read over all the hospital policy that you are bound to before you are able to start your job.

Reading these policies is not easy, which is why your quality department should be helping all the staff to better understand the policies and properly implement it.

OVR will tell you what mistakes a staff can and cannot make. You will also know exactly what a nurse is expected to do in order to uphold the patient safety rules. The claims office will show you which mistakes the hospital will pay for and what they do not cover. This makes it very easy to follow hospital policy and avoid making the same mistakes all the time.