Patient Safety -A Need

The health industry and the health care workers have been in the limelight and getting the recognition for their service to humanity. And, The amount of responsibility that these healthcare workers carry on their shoulders is commendable. Yet, with the huge amounts of care they take, and the time they devote to their service, there are many cases of patient injuries and mishandling while treatment. This has made it mandatory for all the citizens to know about such patient issues and take care that this does not happen anytime again.

Patient Safety across the world is taught as a discipline and has been incorporated as transdisciplinary in many places. The main idea behind this being that to err is human, and we cannot compromise on the lives of many just for human errors. This discipline is evolving and becoming big these days with constant scientific development in the healthcare industry and cases of mishaps increasing.

The concern of patient safety routes back to the necessity of having a proper safe environment for healthcare professionals as well. It is observed and established that these both are interrelated and we need to make the hospital a safer place for everyone involved. 

Tips to minimize errors

• Ensure that the hospital premises have a well established and predefined set of guidelines and the punishments for violations are set. Make the employees well aware of the rules and the repercussions they might face. Also, make a supervising body that might take care of everything, and make sure the rules are followed.
• Inform the patients about the safety rules, and the rights and facilities they have in emergency cases and at times of mishandling. Make the patients also aware of the rights they own and the amount of power they have. Along with this make sure, they know how to exercise their rights as well. 
• Create a transparent and well-connected system. A system that takes a large amount of time to solve a problem or react to a certain query just escalates the intensity of the problem. The hierarchy of people to be approached while something goes wrong should be well structured and spread to every employee and the patient. 
• A safety compliance plan should be developed and supervision at all times is required. A framework should be developed and everyone should be made aware of how the system works. If need be, there should be committed and groups set up so that smooth functioning is ensured. 
• The hospital design or structure of the building should also be looked into developing a safe environment as a whole. Ease of information access, noise levels, scalability, etc, should be taken into consideration at the very beginning when the basement is laid. 

The ecosystem of the hospital consists of everyone, from the doctors, sanitary workers, nurses, and patients. A safer environment is ensured only when everyone in the ecosystem takes equal responsibility in doing their duties successfully with utmost care.

Read on Patient Safety Day.