Patient safety goals: why to set them and how one can achieve them

By following secure medication administration and patient transfer procedures, ensuring no foreign bodies remain within the body during surgery, etc., you’re fulfilling this responsibility to guard patients. However, patient safety goals also can protect nurses.

Why follow patient safety goals?

Patient issues of safety are a number one reason behind malpractice lawsuits involving nurses. Some evaluation by a medical liability insurer indicated that 850 of the 4,634 malpractice claims closed between 2018 and 2021 involved nurses. Out of 850 claims,

• 45% involved patient monitoring.
• 18% involved drug administration.
• 14% were attributed to falls.
• 10% were related to pressure injuries.

Of course, all of the claims were about patient safety. In one other evaluation, the Organization of Nursing Services (NSO) found that of the nurse defendants, 86.8% were RNs. Nursing students represented 1% of recent applications.

How is patient safety defined?

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines patient safety as stopping and reducing risks, errors and harm to patients through the provision of health care. The organization also declared patient safety a global health priority. WHO has also identified patient safety situations of biggest concern which will involve nurses or nursing care. Contain:

• Errors in treatment
• Healthcare-associated infections
• Diagnostic errors
• Unsafe transfusion practices
• Sepsis

On behalf of the Agency for Research and Quality in Health Care (AHRQ), patient safety is a technique to minimize the variety of hostile events and their consequences. Adverse events confer with harm to a patient because of this of medical care, to not the patient’s underlying disease. Subcategories of hostile events include:

• Preventable hostile events attributable to errors or failure to implement preventive strategies
• Mitigated hostile events that can not be prevented but could possibly be less harmful if care were different
• Negligent hostile events that occur when care is below the usual of care expected from health care providers

Some events identified by AHRQ that don’t end in patient harm are near-events. In this scenario, the patient is exposed to a dangerous situation but is just not harmed by accident or early detection. An example can be when the mistaken medication is given to a patient and the nurse discovers this before administering the medication. Errors, the second risk, involve an act or omission that exposes the patient to a potentially dangerous situation. An example of such a hazard can be when a confused, unattended patient falls away from bed, causing injury. Many of my blogs on the legal dilemmas nurses may find themselves in involve patient safety emergencies. For example, a 2021 blog discussed how a nurse’s failure to report a change in a patient’s condition resulted in RN employer liability.

11 suggestions to recollect

Patient safety is the cornerstone of nursing practice. Regardless of the title, patient safety goals should all the time be kept in mind. Here are some tricks to all the time remember:

• Follow your facility’s patient safety protocols to the letter.
• Don’t cut corners when providing care.
• Always comply with current standards of conduct.
• Use critical pondering and clinical judgment when caring for a patient.
• Follow established principles for the secure administration of medicines.
• Listen to your patients in the event that they query medications or raise other concerns about their care.
• Transfer patients using only established procedures.
• If you’re a student nurse, during your clinical rotation, don’t exceed your comfort level in providing care.
• Take out your personal skilled liability insurance policy and stick with it thus far.
• Serve on risk management and quality assurance committees.
• Remember that if patient safety is in danger, your right to practice can also be violated.