Patient Safety
Improvement
Patient safety improvement and quality of care are and
have always been the foundation and core mission tenets of all health care
providers and professionals; however, healthcare providers cannot just
communicate their dedication to quality and patient safety improvement. An environment and
culture of quality and safety must be created, fostered, and improved
within each healthcare setting. A true patient focus is achieved when
every staff member has a commitment to excellence in patient care and
operational performance that is demonstrated everyday in practice and
actions. And, most importantly, the continuous evaluation of quality from
a patient perspective will lead to greater clinical consistency and
effectiveness in the care delivered.
Healthcare providers are under pressure
from all directions to improve patient safety. To demonstrate the
importance of patient safety and quality today, look at the 2004
initiatives of two leading healthcare organizations, the American Hospital
Association and the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare
Organizations.
In December 2002, the American Hospital
Association (AHA), the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and
the Federation of American Hospitals (FAH) publicly agreed to take a
leadership role on one of the most important issues facing our field:
making information public about the quality of hospital care. This
program, called the Quality Initiative: A Public Resource on Hospital
Performance, is gaining national attention and has approximately 2500 US
hospitals participating.
In addition, the American Hospital
Association has undertaken a series of initiatives to bring national
attention to improving patient care and safety. These initiatives have
focused upon:
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Evaluating
care as to being "patient-centered"; |
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Narrowing
the range in variation of care provided to patients, especially in
regard to palliative care and care at the end-of-life; |
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Involving
patients in decisions concerning their health care, and |
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Utilizing
the Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award criteria to assist hospitals in
their efforts to improve care provided to patients. |
Effective January 1, 2004 the Joint
Commission has established the following 2004 national patient safety
improvement goals in the healthcare organization accreditation process.
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Improve the
accuracy of patient identification; |
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Improve the
effectiveness of communication among caregivers; |
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Improve the
safety of using high-alert medications; |
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Eliminate
wrong-site, wrong-patient, wrong-procedure surgery; |
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Improve the
safety of using infusion pumps; |
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Improve the
effectiveness of clinical alarm systems; and |
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Reduce the
risk of health care-acquired infections. |
The one healthcare process that has
received the most adverse publicity and a loud call for corrective action
is the medication administration process. Depending on the source, 44,000
to 98,000 patients die of medical errors each year; and medication errors
alone cost $3.9 billion a year, according to the FDA. A physician ordering
a drug or the pharmacy detecting drug interactions or nursing giving an
accurate and timely medication to the patient are not the only possible
causes for medication errors. Errors can be created in all steps in the
total process of ordering, delivering, and administering drugs safely to
patients.
As with the medication administration
process, the first step to implement a patient safety improvement program is to
define your processes. Many people do this in an ad hoc manner, since they
do not have a methodical approach. A methodical approach exists based on
the Shaw patented method - Customer-Inspired Process
Deployment®. The
methodology starts with how an external customer experiences your
organization and creates the structure of your organization as an
assemblage of processes. This approach will most likely look quite
different than your traditional organization chart. In fact, the
organization chart really has little to do with how work gets done, in
most cases.
Once individual processes are defined, they
can be prioritized and managed. Again, Shaw Resources provides a method
that selects high priority processes for improvement and shows you how to
establish process performance measurements and implement process
improvements to maximize quality, safety, efficiency and cost
effectiveness.
Over 400 healthcare process improvement
teams have used the Shaw method to implement thousands of
customer-inspired® process improvements ( including patient safety
improvements ) and to enable their organizations
to thrive. Two Shaw healthcare clients have made so much progress that
they have been able to win state quality awards, which means they have
competed successfully with advanced industrial organizations for these
awards.
If your organization is ready to get really
serious about patient safety improvement, contact Shaw Resources today - your patient
and staff satisfaction will be enhanced and your bottom line will rise to
the occasion.
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