Safety and quality

Kelly Ransom

The Joint Commission and the centers for Medicaid and Medicare services have placed clinical standards and specific guidelines related to patient safety, quality care and patient care. Being able to provide care safely and effectively to prevent costly medical errors is the main focus. The clinical standards give nurses and medical professionals with a lay out to go by to prevent “never events”. Never events are identified as serious and costly errors in health care services that should never happen. According to CMS, never events are clearly identifiable, preventable and serious errors that harm the patient and reduce credibility of the health care facility. Of the care management events, giving wrong medications to the wrong patient and all medication errors. 

As a nurse in a long-term care facility, our main role is to pass their medications at scheduled intervals. The impact that it makes on our patients is to give medications related to medical conditions and how they affect the resident. We monitor our residents 24 hours a day with three different shifts. When passing medications, the five rights are followed. Right person, right route, right dose, right medication and right time. We had an event in our facility that five rights were not followed and two residents with the same last name were given the opposites medication. One resident had increased HR and blood pressure was lowered significantly and the nurse had to send resident to hospital for interventions. The resident survived and the nurse was terminated. Nurses should make decisions without rushing and without distractions. Using the five rights would prevent most medication errors.

Nurse specific challenges that are present in our facility is lack of communication and following up with orders placed. Also time, stress and fatigue are a few more challenges that are present. Nurses have the ability to speak up for their residents and communicate effectively with the providers. Being able to have adequate staff and staff following the same guidelines is also a challenge. This comes back to lack of communication and the barrier between agencies sending in nursing staff and not following facility policies. The organization faulters in the structure as more events can occur. When full time staff is in place, the facility can track such things as med errors, acquired pressure ulcers, falls, etc. and have care plans in place. The staff being able to follow the care plans has been difficult when there is not consistency.

References

Forster, A.J., Dervin, G., Martin, C. & Papp, S. (2012). 

Csilla Orban Bonacci

 I choose surgery errors such as wrong site surgery.

According to the NQF they first coined the term “never events” in 2001 an organization in the USA that wants to ensure patient safety and quality care through public reporting. The NQF believes that “never events” are events that are preventable and can affect the credibility of a hospital. Over the years the NQF has identified numerous never events and these never events are broken down into categories: surgical, criminal, patient protection, and management radiologic just to name a few. 

Of the surgical never events we can find errors such as the wrong surgical procedure performed on the patient, surgery on the wrong body part, leaving objects inside the patient that were supposed to come out, and others. 

The nurse has a tremendous role in this case. This is why nurses working in the OR have to call a “time out” where everyone stops and identifies the patient and verifies why he or she is there and what procedure he or she needs to have done. Also, they count how many gauzes, sponges, and instruments they used and how many are left at the end of the procedure. All these are done to follow standards of care and guarantee patient safety. 

What contributes to surgical errors? A study in the past showed that Iran was the country with the highest number of surgical errors. In underdeveloped countries reporting errors is not common. Lack of properly trained surgeons, staff, surgeon-to-patient ratio, lack of instruments needed for surgery, etc. all contribute to surgical errors. 

As nurses, we can try our best to follow standards of care and even then we can make errors. Errors can be in the form of communication, system failure, due to fatigue, etc. It is up to us to speak up when we need help when we are tired when we need a break, when we cannot pick up a shift, when a machine is broken, or when we were not given a report. Being proactive helps nurses reduce medical errors and reduce patient safety events. 

We can avoid these kinds of surgical or medical errors by following the guidelines of mandatory reporting, working as a team, asking for help when we do not know something instead of just winging it, etc. 

Also, it is important to identify the patient by name and date of birth is possible. These are all simple guidelines we learned in nursing school that sometimes we can forget to do. We must not forget the most basic guidelines that ensure standard care.