Patient Quality and Safety in Healthcare: Issues and Solutions

This essay delves into the crucial topic of patient quality and safety in healthcare, highlighting its historical significance and the growing concern over preventable harm to patients. It explores various factors impacting patient safety, including patient-related, provider-related, and environmental factors. The essay examines the economic and patient outcome implications of quality-related care, emphasizing the need for initiatives to reduce medical errors and improve patient outcomes. It also discusses the importance of nursing leadership, effective communication, and teamwork in ensuring patient safety. Furthermore, it analyzes the behavioral leadership theory and its relevance in shaping nurses' actions and educational preparation. The essay concludes by emphasizing the need for comprehensive changes across the healthcare system to address patient safety concerns and prevent negative implications in future service delivery.

Running head: PATIENT QUALITY AND SAFETY IN HEALTHCARE 1
Patient Quality and Safety in Healthcare
Name
Institution

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Patient Quality and Safety in Healthcare
In essence, the issue of patient safety has for a long time now been the focal point of
various healthcare practice as well as nursing throughout the history of medicine. Nonetheless,
there has been an increasing case of a non-deliberate accidental harm on patients seeking care
services across the world (Porter-O'Grady & Malloch, 2015). Notably, these incidents may
occur at any level of healthcare whether managerial curative, clinical, preventative, or even in
the general healthcare setting, and private health care sectors. Additionally, these scenarios may
occur at any stage of management in the healthcare system. To the nurses’ leaders, the main
focus is often based on the quality as well as the safety of patients under their watch. As a result,
the safety of a patient is considered an important part of the healthcare system and therefore it
assists in defining the quality of health care services (Porter-O'Grady & Malloch, 2015). As
nurses’ leaders, keeping patients safe has become a challenging experience due to the fact that
mistakes, as well as errors, do happen on a daily basis particularly in the health care system.
According to researchers, medical errors have been responsible for a large number of preventable
deaths in the contemporary world thus keeping patients safe remain a great challenge (Taylor,
McKinnon, Thorpe, & Gillmer, 2017). Notably, this has raised various concerns on operating
systems as well as methods to be taken with an aim of reducing the likelihood of errors occurring
when handling a patient.
While the main goal of various health care systems is to keep a high level of patient’s
safety, there are various scenarios where these goals have been violated (Porter-O'Grady &
Malloch, 2015). There are various reasons why this topic has become a challenge to both the
nurses, patients but as well. Apparently, some of these factors include a patient diagnosis safety,
medication safety, antibiotic resistance, as well as sepsis, and unnecessary emergency

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department admission (Sauro, Quan, Sikdar, Faris, & Jette, 2017). While patients tend to become
much older, they are therefore going to the hospital particularly with more acute conditions. In
this case, there are various factors that have been isolated to case poor or lack of patient’s quality
and safety in the health care system (Porter-O'Grady & Malloch, 2015). Some of the main factors
that has facilitated the rise in quality and patient’s safety concern include patient-related factors
such as the type of illness that a patient is suffering from; the provider related factors such as the
overall competence of the providers and providers motivation as well as satisfaction; and
environmental related factors such as the healthcare system, the available resource and
leadership and management. According to various researches, lack of quality control in regards
to patient’s safety has had a huge impact on the involved stakeholders. One of the main impacts
of quality related care in the health care system is the aspect of economic impact. Medical errors
have been translated to about $70 billion (Porter-O'Grady & Malloch, 2015). On the other hand,
turning to a safety culture by medical system is likely to affect the patient’s outcome in a positive
manner.
With the increased cases of quality as well as safety-related issues in hospitals, there
has been a need to set out a working initiative to reduce such incidences to happen in future and
therefore leading to patient’s better outcomes (Porter-O'Grady & Malloch, 2015). Some of the
adjustments that can be done include reducing the overall waiting time for all the services that
are provided in the healthcare systems. While there are a lot of improvements in regards to the
patient’s quality of life, there are still those health care sectors where patients can spend hours
while waiting to get medical attention. Despite the fact that such cases can be as a result of a
limited number of nurses available, this problem can be fixed by ensuring that it has been
addressed effectively through continued review by the nurses’ leaders (Ensafian, Yaghoubi, &

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Yazdi, 2017). Moreover, one way of attaining quality as well as safety standards of patients in
hospitals is by making sure that specialty nurses get certified as well as being involved in a local
specialty organization. As a leader in nursing, this will ensure that patients receive top quality
services thus ensuring that there is a guaranteed safety in service delivery. Another way that
nursing management can do this is by making sure that they monitor all the process with an aim
of evaluating the overall standards of care while monitoring various major metrics for quality as
well as safety and therefore address any possible deficiencies.
Primarily, there are various traits that a nurse leader is expected to have to deliver a
top service not only to the patients but also to other nurses and colleagues (de Wilde, de Jong, Le
Brun, Guchelaar, & Schimmel, 2018). One basic skill that a nurse leader is expected to have is
good communication skill. In essence, communication skills are essential, especially when
disseminating information related to health care or even giving out instruction on how various
procedures are to be undertaken by nurses (Dang et al., 2018). Additionally, a good nurse’s
leader should have a sense of teamwork to make sure that staff satisfaction is maintained and
thus creating a networking environment in a particular hospital in relation to the quality of life of
patients.
While there are various leadership theories that can be incorporated into the overall
AONE executive manager, the behavioral theory is no doubt one of the most suitable in this case.
In this light, behavioral theory emphasizes the belief that leaders are made rather than being born
(Kerner, Schmidbauer, Tietz, Marung, & Genzwuerker, 2017). This theory mostly focuses on the
actions of a particular leader instead of their internal states such as mental observations (Chang,
Lin, Fu, McConnell, & Sun, 2017). In essence, executive nurses often use their competencies
highlighting their self-assessment due to the fact that they are useful in the overall identification

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of a clear possible area for growth and development. In connection to the stated theory, aspiring
nurses can use this leadership competency in nurturing their behavioral approach especially in
shaping their actions in relation to their daily operation in the hospital (Coleman, Peacock, Bunz,
& Alberts, 2017). On the other hand, nurses’ educators can as well use these competencies as a
guideline for their curriculum development, particularly for educational preparation.
Improving the overall patient safety as well as another dimension of the healthcare
requires drastic changes particularly at all level of the health care system. However, in case
favorable initiatives to improve quality, as well as patient’s safety, is not successfully implement,
there are various implications that are likely to be encountered in the future services delivery in
the healthcare system (Aiken et al., 2017). For instance, in case the issue of competencies is not
fixed, there is a high chance that more errors related to patient care, diagnosis, and medication
will be committed in the future. On the other hand, if the nurses and medical practitioners are not
well motivated and well equipped, then there is a chance that they will delay the process of
service delivery thus resulting to long waiting time by patients in the hospitals. Failing to resolve
the issue at hand successful will as well cause patients dissatisfactions in the health care system.
In conclusion, it is evident that the issue regarding the quality as well as safety
healthcare of patients is a prevalent topic in most medical discourses especially in the
contemporary society where there have been various limiting factors to quality medical delivery.
Nonetheless, there is a need to solve issues related to quality and patient’s safety in the health
care system across the world; otherwise, there would be more implications in case there are no
successful initiatives to improve the quality of life of not only patients but also medical
practitioners.

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