Managing Patient safety Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2750 words

Managing Patient safety - Essay Example (I.O.M, 1999). Harm occurs if a patient’s quality of life or health is negatively affected by any element of their interaction with health care. This would be as a result of patient safety incident, which is any healthcare related event that is unexpected, unintended, and undesired and which could have or did harm the patients. It is, therefore, upon the NHS to ensure high standard, as well as safe clinical care is maintained and make sure they are in line with the current technology. According to the department of health, patient safety needs to be prioritized, as far as health care system is concern. The resulting patient safety management knowledge continually heighten improvement efforts to better patients’ welfare such as applying lessons learned from industry and business, educating consumers and providers, adopting innovative technologies, enhancing the error and the reporting systems, and finally developing new economic incentives (Fleming, M, 2000). Arguably, r esearchers ought to investigate and find out the effectiveness of patient safety in the health care system. This, in essence, can help ascertain the measures that can improve the conditions if need be. In this paper, my major concern entails patient care as practiced in any health care services with major focus on medication safety based on analyzing the current issues of patient safety management and understanding of systems and human factors in maintaining patient safety. It is evident from research that as far as patient safety is concerned, medication safety is one of the major issues that is quite disturbing. In this regard, human factors, which correlate with medication safety, play a major role, in so far as patient safety is concerned and cannot be overlooked when dealing with such sensitive issue as patient safety. Negligence, as a human factor, has increasingly become one major factor that affects medication safety basically because of lack of concern among the health care practitioners. For instance, I remember one critical instant when a health care practitioner, acting out of negligence, failed to rescue the life of Elain Bremonung, a young woman who was admitted in the hospital for routine sinus surgery. During the anaesthetic, she had breathing problems and the attending anaesthetist was slow at responding to the situation, thus became unable to insert a device to open her airway. The most distressing thing about it is that the affected patient was in a critical state. If not for the alarm sounded by one of the friends of the affected patient, the patient would have passed on. Arguably, there were no grave consequences reaped on this incident, however, one thing that is clear is that medication safety is up stake in many of the health care systems. This incident clearly shows that human factors, as well as organization factors play a role in medical safety. This, therefore, calls for need to investigate the link between organizational and human factors in relation to patient safety. I have considered such issues in my presentation. Hence in doing so, I would come up with an incident that reflects the role of organization and human factors in patient safety and finally outline recommendations to the situation. Patient safety. Patient safety is the prevention, avoidance and amelioration of adverse injuries or outcomes stemming from the processes of medical care. It is also freedom from healthcare associated, preventable harm. A