National Patient Safety Goals

1 National Patient Safety Goals Patient safety issues are the leading cause of increased avoidable costs of care. Medical errors compromise the quality of care provided, which directly influence patient outcomes, spending, and satisfaction with care. The Joint Commission designed national patient safety goals in 2019 with the aim of improving patient safety by reducing the occurrence of medical errors (Gandhi, Kaplan, Leape, Berwick, Edgman-Levitan, Edmondson & Wachter, 2018). These safety goals are designed to focus on common problems in healthcare and provide solutions to them. The safety goals have been categorized into eight major groups; patient identification, communication, safe medicine use, safe alarm use, infection prevention, identification of patient safety risks and prevention of mistakes in surgery.

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2 Prevention of Infections The number of infections acquired from the hospital or while seeking treatment is alarming. In the long run, it compromises patient safety. This safety goal aims at reducing the incidences of hospital acquired infections (HAIs) (Gandhi et al., 2018). It recommends using handwashing guidelines from the CDC and WHO to prevent transmission of infectious agents.

Evidence-based prevention and control measures should also be used to formulate policies within healthcare facilities to prevent central line-associated blood infections, surgical site infections, infections due to multi-drug resistant organisms and catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI) (Fracica & Fracica, 2021).

Opportunities to Achieving these Goals in Our Work Environment Preventing HAIs is a collective responsibility for every staff within the facility. The hand washing policy is easier to implement as it is low cost and does not require expertise. However, commitment to implementing the hand washing policies may be a challenge. Staff can be motivated by having easy to assess hand washing stations positioned strategically, which makes it convenient for them to hand wash. Staff should be continually reminded to adopt a culture of hand washing and be continually assessed for the same (Fracica & Fracica, 2021).

Evidence based approaches to preventing hospital HAIs can be easily adopted in our work environment with continual staff education on prevention strategies. This requires staff to be up to date with the current evidences that are used to prevent infections. Policies and guidelines can be formulated based on these evidences and the staff educated on their implementation. The organization will therefore be required to invest on educating staff and regularly assessing their competence on implementing the evidence based measures (Gandhi et al., 2018).

3 Challenges to Achieving these Goals in Our Work Environment Achieving patient safety goals will require that staff adopt change in various ways within their departments. Readiness for change can be one of the biggest challenges. This is because staff can be resistant to change due to various reasons such as low motivation, poor satisfaction and inadequate time among others. It may also be hard to convince them that there is a need for change without facts or statistics. Therefore, it is a necessity to assess the readiness to adopt change and address the possible barriers to change, prior to change implementation (Gandhi et al., 2018). Another possible challenge is having the correct leadership to influence, motivate and sustain change. Achieving quality improvement and safety goals requires the right kind of leadership to ensure that the change is adopted and becomes part of the organizational culture.

Leadership is also required for sustainability and continual assessments of change.

4 References Fracica P.J., Fracica E.A. (2021). Patient Safety. In: Giardino A., Riesenberg L., Varkey P. (eds) Medical Quality Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-03048080-6_4 Gandhi, T. K., Kaplan, G. S., Leape, L., Berwick, D. M., Edgman-Levitan, S., Edmondson, A., ... & Wachter, R. (2018). Transforming concepts in patient safety: a progress report. BMJ Quality & Safety, 27(12), 1019-1026. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjqs-2017007756