Select one of the National patient safety goals. What are your thoughts about the opportunities and challenges related to achieving at least two goals in your work environment?
The goals highlight problems that healthcare organizations encounter and potential solutions. The safety goals include safely using medicines, preventing infection, using alarms, identifying which patients are at risk, improving communication, accurate identification of patients, and preventing mistakes in surgery. Improving the accuracy of the identification of patients is a goal that my profession seeks to achieve. Errors concerning patients are bound to happen in the healthcare sector, and the effects are adverse (Lippi, 2017). Therefore, it is essential if the system accurately identifies the patient and match the treatment needed to the patient. The safety of patients is a factor that many health organizations prioritize. The patient’s specimen should be marked in the patient’s presence to avoid misidentifications (Lippi, 2017). Newborns who are at a high risk of identification errors should have distinct identification methods used, such as a specific naming system and enhanced communication among the staff.
There are several ways that the nursing profession has integrated to avoid patient identification errors. While interacting with the patients, the nurses treat them as partners to enable easy identification (Lippi, 2017). The patients are typically asked to state their identifiers instead of being asked to confirm (Lippi, 2017). Family members, if present, are involved in the identification process when it is appropriate. The outpatients are asked to identify themselves either by phone number, name, or date number, and the information is matched with their medical records (Lippi, 2017). The inpatients are verbally evaluated to see if the comprehension of their identity matches with the information on their wristbands.
To achieve accuracy in the patient identification process has several challenges that hinder success. Integration is a challenge that the healthcare system faces as the technological systems at times fail to share information (Lippi, 2017). The technological systems have different identifiers of the patients, and they may disseminate unreliable information since they cannot communicate. Thus duplicate records may be created, leading to misidentification of a patient and posing health threats. When duplicate records are created, the lack of alarms causes more problems in providing healthcare services (Lippi, 2017). Some patients refuse to wear wristbands for identification while hospitalized, and this limits the system’s efficiency. The trend towards having the nurses work for a few hours to prevent episodes of burnouts leads to several caregivers attending to a patient and thus increasing the chances of misidentification (Lippi, 2017). Cultural issues cause challenges in patient identification as some patient’s way of life does not support some healthcare practices. For instance, the name structure and inaccurate birth dates are potential barriers.
Effective communication among medical personnel is the second goal that the nursing profession is striving to achieve. The main aim of the goal is to ensure the test results get to the right medical personnel on time for treatment to start right away. Communication among healthcare practitioners, especially nurses, is an essential component that impacts the outcomes of a patient (Foronda, 2016). Ineffective communication between the physicians and nurses contributes to medical errors, thus increasing healthcare organizations cost (Foronda, 2016). Team training is conducted to improve the skills between the nurses and the physicians to enhance effective communication. The training gives an insight into the roles of both practitioners hence increases their cooperation (Foronda, 2016). The use of communication tools is an effective way of promoting the flow of information since they focus on the patients’ needs and treatment.
Several challenges hinder effective communication between the nurses and the physicians. Conflicts with colleagues are a barrier to effective communication and detract the caregivers from providing quality care to the patients (Foronda, 2016). Increased workload deters the nurses from sharing the concerns of their patients since they are working under intense pressure, and hence they quickly get irritated and have burnouts. Lack of collaboration between the physicians and nurses in the sharing of information contributes to an ineffective relationship (Foronda, 2016). The nurses may have a heavy workload, thus lack time to inform the physicians of the patient’s progress (Foronda, 2016). A positive patient outcome relies on teamwork among nurses and physicians. For communication to be clear, it must include the necessary information, be concise, and prompt adequate healthcare.
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