Enhancing Quality and Safety Health Care in the United States

Posted: January 5th, 2023

Enhancing Quality and Safety Health Care in the United States

Improving Quality of Care and Patient Safety

Enhancing Quality and Safety Health Care in the United States

February 2021

Enhancing Quality and Safety Health Care in the United States

Over recent years, there has been an alarming trend of the medical administration linked mortality cases in the United States. The majority of the reported cases are being attributed to being caused by sepsis, which results in septic shock across various age groups. There has been an insight into the complications being reported favorably for patients visiting multiple healthcare facilities to seek medical attention due to some of the nurses’ negligence and fatigue (Kilbourne et al. 2018). The nurses are currently ranked as the third cause of mortalities within the united states, with various cases arising from their medical administration being undocumented. Since nurses are central in the provision of health care services, their coordination with multiple stakeholders within the health care setting can help coordinate the drive of achieving quality and safety enhancements in medical administration.

Elements of Successful Quality Improvement

Four key elements are essential in the goal of achieving a successful quality improvement program. A deep understanding of the problem is core in the journey of successfully improving a quality program (Kilbourne et al. 2018). One must also buy-in the quality improvement program as well as the problem it targets to improve. In a quality improvement program within the health system, the leaders must have the goal they are targeting, based on the return on investment and cost-benefit analyses (Sonğur, Özer, Gün, and Top 2018). While working to achieve the quality improvement program’s goals, there must be objectives and aims set. These aims are designed to break up the whole program into small manageable pieces (Panagioti et al. 2018). The measures instituted on the baselines and actuals are critical since they determine if the quality program being undertaken within the health care system improves and how the improvements correlated to intervention.

Patient-Safety Risk Factors

The various patient-safety risk factors such as nurse’s fatigue, distractions, and the inability to follow the given policies and procedures threaten the patient’s safety. The multiple errors in the patient include prescription, dispensing, and wrong medication. When nurses are overworked or feel fatigued, they are highly likely to commit mistakes in giving the wrong medication or prescription to the patients despite the medicine being indicated down in the order list (Sonğur, Özer, Gün, and Top 2018). The errors in medications like acetaminophen endanger the patient’s liver, which is more costly to treat. Distractions in the ward as the nurses are busy taking care of several patients within the health care system are highly likely to cause errors in the medication she is providing. Therefore if the nurses can be connected to only one patient, this menace can be avoided. The inability to follow the policies and procedures as stipulated in the standard operating procedures provided by the health care system is highly likely to cause wrong complications, for instance, the wrong prescription in the administration of drugs (Panagioti et al. 2018). The inability may be due to the nurses’ pressure mounted due to serving many patients.

Patient Safety Improvement Strategy

In order to achieve safe and quality health care in the United States, two programs can be developed. These programs are designed to utilize the resources available maximum, reducing costs and improving the health care system (Kilbourne et al. 2018). Schneeweiss (2018) argues that accountability that comes with an automated system owed to the accessibility of the system to make changes being only encrypted to passwords, which are personal for every health care professional hence ensuring accountability in case of any error. This is an essential factor as medical mistakes are costly to both the patient and management. For instance, complications that arise upon a medical error occurring translate to the patient digging deeper into their pockets to access proper care to amend the mistake. The patient is convinced to change the hospital after such a mistake. The patient can also sue the hospital, translating to higher costs as the hospital pays for the bills arising from medical errors. The subjection to verification of the hospital by the health officials also comes at a hospital management cost. The automated system in health care is vital in ensuring the accountability and safety of the patient since all the medication records are fed within the program at any particular stage within the medical facility with any healthcare professional in charge of the authorization of specific medication and dosage being accountable and also the nurse who was in order at that particular period (Panagioti et al. 2018). This is through the computerized physician order entry (CPOE) in the Electronic Health Record system, which allows the medical professionals to enter and send medication orders along with the treatment instructions electronically. The patient’s data is fed into the hospital’s database once the patient enters the hospital, and changes are made in whatever department the patient is sent. After the patient is discharged from the hospital, the data remains unchanged till the next visit, when it is altered (Chien et al. 2021). Thus, the CPOE safeguards the medical errors by nurses as the medical history of the patient, including the allergies, is documented in the record.  Transmission of documents and orders online is cheaper than the paperwork and is a way safer. The nurses’ extension of the care coordination program for the patients even outside the healthcare facility environs is essential in improving the quality as the patients are attached to that nurse who will always be communicating with the patient and check on the progress (Schneeweiss 2018).

Nurse Coordination in Health Care

Nurses play a central role in the healthcare setting, and their coordination of care can increase patient safety with medication administration and reduces various aspects. Attaching a patient to a specific health nurse since the onset and throughout the medication period in a health care setting can help achieve patient safety (Sonğur et al. 2018). This is because it ensures accountability of errors in case of any complications arising from the medical mistake that the nurse attached to the patient ordered. The nurse attached to that patient also regularly checks the patient’s progress even outside the health facility after discharge. This reduces the hospital’s cost in employing more extension officers and enhancing the quality and safe health care.

Health Care Stakeholder Coordination

The coordination between various stakeholders within the health care system helps achieve the goal of enhancing quality health care. For instance, good rapport between the nurses and the patient helps correct the patient’s disease, hence minimizing the patient’s chance of receiving the wrong medication administered for the illness they are not suffering from. The healthcare leaders’ cooperation with the nurses helps implement the procedure that best favors both the patient and the nurses, like implementing the best practice that best fits patients with certain conditions and granting the right materials to attend the patient. The transmission of the patient history between the particular nurse attached to the patient to the rest of the nurses via an automated system is useful in cutting off the cost. Proper enumeration and on-time payment facilitate the health care system as nurses. The government is in constant consultation with the legislative bodies, preventing continued unrest, which might infringe the nurses’ services to the patients as they take on streets to demand better working conditions or payments. The physicians play an oversight role to the nurses, hence guiding the nurses of any procedures they are undertaking, which minimizes the patients’ medical errors. The online order transmission between physicians and nurses in the Computerized physician order entry method will be cost-effective as well as ensuring errors are eliminated since the nurses will check in constant communication with other nurses.   

Sepsis Health Condition

Sepsis is an upcoming life-threatening condition that develops when the body’s immune system damages its tissues. This infection-fighting process onsets the body to cause the organ to function poorly and abnormally (König et al. 2019). The condition further escalates to cause a septic shock as severe blood pressure drops, leading to severe effects in organs and probably death. The early-onset medication increases the patient’s survival chances, which are only possible if there are correct diagnoses and administration of the right drugs such as antibiotics and intravenous fluids (Kilbourne et al. 2018). Incorrect administration of intravenous fluids puts the patient at risk of dying.

Conclusion

Ultimately, problems, aims, goals, and measures are vital elements in a successful quality improvement program. Improvising the automated database system within the health care system can facilitate the health care program’s quality and safety. The factors such as the pressure mounted on the nurses as they attend the patients translates to the distractions and also make the nurses get fatigue as they attend to many patients hence the likelihood of the errors such as wrong medications and errors in prescription. Coordination between nurses and multiple stakeholders within the health care like fellow nurses, the patient, and physicians helps in the program’s success, particularly the sepsis scenario, which is an upcoming life-threatening condition. The automated system as well attachment of the patients to one nurse ensure less distraction and the coordination of communication through computerized physician order entry minimize errors as well as being cost-effective.

References

Chien, S. C., Chin, Y. P., Yoon, C. H., Islam, M. M., Jian, W. S., Hsu, C. K., … & Li, Y. C. (2021). A novel method to retrieve alerts from a homegrown Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) system of an academic medical center: Comprehensive alert characteristic analysis. Plos one, 16,(2), e0246597.

Kilbourne, A. M., Beck, K., Spaeth‐Rublee, B., Ramanuj, P., O’Brien, R. W., Tomoyasu, N., & Pincus, H. A. (2018). Measuring and improving the quality of mental health care: a global perspective. World Psychiatry, 17(1), 30-38.

Matt, B., Kortgen, A., Turnbull, A. E., & Hartog, C. S. (2019). What matters most to sepsis survivors: a qualitative analysis to identify specific health-related quality of life domains. Quality of Life Research, 28(3), 637-647.

Panagioti, M., Geraghty, K., Johnson, J., Zhou, A., Panagopoulou, E., Chew-Graham, C., … & Esmail, A. (2018). Association between physician burnout and patient safety, professionalism, and patient satisfaction: a systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA internal medicine, 178(10), 1317-1331.

Sonğur, C., Özer, Ö., Gün, Ç., & Top, M. (2018). Patient safety culture, evidence-based practice and performance in nursing. Systemic Practice and Action Research, 31(4), 359-374.

Schneeweiss, S. (2018). Automated data-adaptive analytics for electronic healthcare data to study causal treatment effects. Clinical epidemiology, 10, 771.