Reply to my peers

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Reply to my peers

Peer 1

Identify the role of patient safety and the influence on the Federal initiatives that are used to prevent unintentional death as a result of medical mistakes.

According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, there must be a foundation built in order to come up with a plan for coming up with effective solutions to decreasing all medical errors, including sentinel deaths. There are three key, ongoing challenges as stated in the article:

  • Develop a solid evidence base.
  • Design and evaluate useful strategies and tools.
  • Disseminate information and tools for implementation, (AHRQ, 2018).

Patient safety has been talked about since 1999 to the present. It is an important subject for very obvious reasons.  Medical errors have been one of those topics that is examined on a continual basis. One reason is because nurses, doctors, and pharmacists may not report all the medical errors that occur, so the numbers are skewed. These types of errors make up the greatest cause of patient deaths. The type of medical errors are related to medication given to the incorrect patient, any hospital acquired infections, misdiagnosis in which the wrong treatment is implemented, and it also can be not acting on results, and the lists can go on and on. 

There are 7 safety goals for 2021 from the Joint Commission and they are as follows:

  1. Improve the accuracy of patient identification.
  2. Improve staff communication.
  3.  Improve the safety of medication administration.
  4. Reduce patient harm associated with clinical alarm systems.
  5. Reduce the risk of healthcare-associated infections.
  6. Better identify patient safety risks in the hospital. 
  7. Better prevent surgical mistakes, (Becker, 2021).

There are ways to decrease these errors, monitor certain populations that are very vulnerable because they are at greater risks. It is good to come up with different ways to collaborate as teams, meaning all disciplines communicate because this is how teams can be on the same page, meaning everybody knows what each other are doing when it comes to the patients. Everyone must be made accountable and report errors when they happen so a solution can be made to a possible ongoing issue. 

 References

Advancing Patient Safety. Contect last reviewed October 2018. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville, MD.

Becker Hospital Review. 7 patient safety goals for 2021 from Joint Commission. https://https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-safety-outcomes/6-patient-safety-goals-for-2021-from-joint-commission.html

Peer 2

The role of patient safety in medical errors is to prevent and reduce errors or harm to patients that occur during healthcare. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (ARHQ) is a federal agency that focus on patient safety and the quality of the American healthcare system. It is one of the twelve agencies that are part of the US Department of Health and Human services. They work hard to find solutions to prevent unintentional deaths caused by medical mistakes. Research show that approximately 250,000 healthy people die yearly from medical errors in the US. Medical errors are the 3rdleading cause of death in the US after heart and cancer related deaths. Medical errors are a serious public health concern and the AHRQ has campaigned important research related to patient safety, decreasing medical errors and improvement on clinical decision making (Advancing Patient Safety, 2018).

The AHRQ have developed a program called TeamSTEPPS as a teamwork system for healthcare. It offers a powerful solution to improving collaboration and communication among healthcare professionals. It focuses on supporting team performance principles, including training requirements. It is based on four skills: communication, leadership, situational monitoring, and mutual support (Rodziewicz, 2016). The Affordable Care Act also focuses on improving patient safety. They have initiatives that focus on improving patient safety by lowering the rate of hospital acquired conditions and infections, also decreasing complications that result in patients being readmitted to the hospital. Patient safety in healthcare continues to affect federal initiatives, with focus on better improvement and better patient outcomes; these initiatives will lead to a decrease in medical mistakes and unintentional deaths (Kronick, 2016).

Reference

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (2018). Advancing patient safety: A decade of evidence, design, and implementation. Retrieved from

Kronick, R. (2016). AHRQs role in improving quality, safety, and health system performance. Public Health Reports, 131(2), 229232. doi: 10.1177/003335491613100205

Rodziewicz, T. L., & Hipskind, J. E. (2019, May 5). Medical error prevention. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK499956/