Key Elements of Patient Safety and Joint Commission's Role

This article reflects on the key elements of patient safety defined by the Joint Commission and their role in improving healthcare quality. It discusses the importance of reducing risks and healthcare-associated infections.

Health Quality Improvement

1. Reflect on what the Joint Commission defines as safety and identifies as the key elements
of patient safety.
Patient safety is a process by which discipline and responsibility need to be maintained in
healthcare. The main purpose is to prevent, reduce, analysis and report of the medical error that
can lead to an adverse condition in the patient body. It has been observed that with the increase
in the number of years there is an increase in the number of patients suffering from medical
errors, in which most of the cases they were killed. This has resulted in the recognition of the
issues by the World Health Organization refers to the health of the patient being an endemic
concern (Baker, 2017). This also has resulted in the growth of a transdisciplinary body that puts
together efforts and initiative in order to improve patient safety measures. This is done with the
utilization of various technologies and innovation in addition to the increasing knowledge of the
consumers and providers. The Joint Commission has been involved in the establishing of the
various goals related to the patient’s safety which also helps in the accreditation of the
organization helping in the patient society. The accreditation is applied in specific areas which
need to be improved to focus on solving the issues related to patient safety.
The key elements which have been identified by the Joint Commission in order to improve the
health safety of the patient are first, identification of the patients correctly. This helps in the
diagnosis and treatments of the patient which can be done according to the illness of the patient.
It is applicable to all the hospitals home care, ambulatory care and the various critical health care
providers (Mort et al., 2017). The second important key factors are to increase the effectiveness
of the communication between the caregivers. This will help in the diagnosis of the results and
reports of the patients on a timely basis. The third factor is the increase in safety related to the
use of medication provided to the patients so that unlabelled medicines are not provided to the
patients. In addition, it is important to check there is a minimal transfer of health-related
infections, decrease the number of patients falling in the hospital and caregiving sectors which
increases the risk of the health of the patients.
2. Select the element you feel is most important and discuss why.

Amongst the various elements, the most important factor, I feel related to patient safety is a
reduction in the number of risks. These risks have increased due to healthcare-associated
infections. The element complies with the regulation which has been set by the Disease Control
and Prevention department which provides guidelines related to the hand hygiene f the
caregivers before they attend to the patients (Lake et al., 2016). As it has been observed that the
patient acquire various types of infection during the care is been received by the health care
providers. The condition has resulted in the increase in the multi-drug resistance in the patients,
as a result, they do not respond to the different types of drugs during treatments. This is
applicable to all the health care sectors including hospitals, home care, and critical hospital care
sections.

Reference List
Baker, D. W. (2017). History of The Joint Commission’s pain standards: lessons for today’s
prescription opioid epidemic. Jama, 317(11), 1117-1118.
Lake, E. T., Hallowell, S. G., Kutney-Lee, A., Hatfield, L. A., Del Guidice, M., Boxer, B., ... &
Aiken, L. H. (2016). Higher quality of care and patient safety associated with better
NICU work environments. Journal of nursing care quality, 31(1), 24.
Mort, E., Bruckel, J., Donelan, K., Paine, L., Rosen, M., Thompson, D., ... & Peer-to-Peer Study
Team. (2017). Improving health care quality and patient safety through peer-to-peer
assessment: a demonstration project in two academic medical centres. American Journal
of Medical Quality, 32(5), 472-479.