Patient Safety and Quality Improvement | Essay

POSITION STATEMENT ON PATIENT SAFETY AND QUALITY IMPROVEMENT
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Patient Safety is considered as the highest priority in Whitetown Hospital. It has strong
healthcare team which helps to reduce infection rate, medication error and ensure effective
communication between the hospital staff, patient and their families. The hospital provides a
monitoring technology which helps the nurses and physicians in verifying that they are in the
right track while treating a particular patient and keeping up with their individual needs, it
also installed bed alarms to notify the staffs if a patient falls down from the bed, or a barcode
system which helps to verify patient medications. It established a Safety and Health
Management System to encourage compliance with safety protocols. In the Whitetown
Hospital, the nurses and caregivers are dedicated and commited to provide patient centered
care, educating each patient about the importance of patient safety and provide them a safe
and healthy, hygienic environment which will reduce the risk of nosochomeal infection. The
nurses and physicians of the hospital use properly sterilized equipments and instruments
during surgical procedures to reduce the chance of infection amd maintain safety of the
patient. They are also strictly asked to wash their hands properly with sanitizers before
performing any surgery to restrict the spread of bacteria from one patient to another. The
Hospital is commited to create a safe culture, where the employees are encouraged to
improve the quality of care. The hospital installed Electronic Medical Records which
provides a computerized version of the patient health recordsand lab results. This greatly
reduced the chance of errors in the data and made it easier to meet the patient safety goals.
The Whitetown Hospital also has a fall-reduction program which provides guidelines on
patient evaluation, nursing interventions and staff education and training along with proper
patient education and assessment of outcome. Each year, the hospital offers a flu vaccine
program to protect the employees and patients from disease.
Apart from patient safety, the hospital is also committed to improve the quality of health care
delivered to the patients and ensure patient satisfaction. It starts by identifying the area of
problem which needs immediate lookout, prepare a goal for addressing the issue and build
strategies or measures to overcome the issue. It achieves quality improvement by
encouraging patient engagement, delivering compassionate care, reducing medication error
along with bringing a positive change in the overall organization structure, investment in new
technology and infrastructure. The organizational change helps in monitoring performance,
elevate quality improvement and performance with the provision of sufficient resource. To
ensure improvement in the quality of care, the hospital implemented supportive organization-
wide system, conducted regular assessment and provided feedback to the staffs. Moreover,
the Hospital encourages the staffs to provide equal health access to every patient irrespective
of their gender, race and culture, prioritize their needs and provide a safe environment for
their healthy sustaining. All these quality improvement measures helps in the satisfaction of
the customers and also ensure better health outcome of the patients.