Managing Patient safety Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2750 words

Managing Patient safety - Assignment Example The person on whom the medication/ treatment is administered is harmed, and the person who recommends, performs or prescribes the use of the treatment is at fault (MAC, 2010). Each year more than 98, 000 individuals have fatal outcomes medical errors. The errors may arise as a result of doing the wrong treatment wrong treatment, going ahead with the treatment with insufficient information, or due to inefficient processes. About 10 to 20 % of the medical errors are as a result of errors in prescription of drugs or known as ‘medical errors’ (Patel, 2004). The cost of medical errors are very high and this may result in longer hospital stay, post-treatment complications that require a lot of care, etc (Patel, 2004). A more universal definition of a medication consists of any deviation away from the normal intention, expectation or desirability. There are many other ways of perceiving errors includes psychological ways, sensory events, perceptual occasions, cognitively, motor events, any action in well-managed system, and a negative output in a controlled environment Usually an error is related to an adverse effect and even if errors are not caused, they can still occur. For instance even if a drug is perfectly administered according to doses, indications, contraindications, prevention of interaction, etc, an adverse event can still occur as the (Kopec, 2007). Goldberg 2001 considers that the medical errors may have a serious effect on the system such as increasing the patient stay by a couple of days, which adds on to about a spending of $4600 per patient. Overall, with the total number of medical error cases reported every year, about 2.4 million hospital days would be spend and $9.3 billion. The impact is that patients have longer stay (LOS increased), the return to work is longer (indirect costing), and both these direct and indirect costing is preventable to a large extent (Patel, 2004). Most of the medical errors occur at the rate of 1 per day in a hospital, and they have the chance of causing serious negative outcomes for the hospital. Following the medical error, the aggrieved patient has the right to seek damages and compensation. In the year 2008, Medicare declared it would no longer cover for preventable medical errors in healthcare. Today with the introduction of such measures from the CMS and insurance companies, greater efforts are being laid in reducing medical errors as the hospitals are being held responsible (Patel, 2004). A medical error can be related to various aspects of healthcare including:- On a large scale, it is found that from the physician quarters about 57 to 60% of the errors can be prevented if a computerized ordering system is implemented and can be used appropriately (Maganelli, 2009). Patient Safety According to the AHRQ, patient safety is defined as â€Å"...as a discipline in the health care professions that applies safety science methods toward the goal of achieving a trustworthy system of he alth care delivery...’. Here greater efforts are being placed on trust in the healthcare delivery system (AHRQ, 2008). According to the IOM, patient safety is defined as â€Å"...the prevention of harm to patients...† They have placed greater emphasis preventing errors, learning from past errors, building a culture that is safe for the patients including efforts from organisation, professionals and the patients (Mitchell 2008). During