Patient Safety
Every day in Canada, patients’ safety is threatened by potential harms that nurses have the professional and ethical responsibility to minimize or prevent. These safety concerns can be referred to as incidents, adverse events, unsafe acts, errors, and harms. Nurses play a significant role in improving patient safety and minimizing patient harm. The purpose of this paper is to identify patient safety concerns and strategize ways that nurses, health care teams, and health care organizations can mitigate these concerns.
• Examine the significance of patient safety principles in nursing practice
• Analyze the implications of high risk behaviours and unsafe practices in health care
• Identify strategies to ensure that health care providers are better positioned to provide safe, effective, efficient, and quality care
• Compose an academic paper with critical reasoning and application of relevant nursing concepts, principles, and professional standards
1. Compose an academic paper that addresses the following:
• Identify a practice error/issue/concern that you have encountered or observed. This could be related to your role as a student nurse, patient, family member, or member of a health care team.
o Clearly state the problem or event
o Define the problem as a pattern and not just as an isolated event
• Conduct a root cause analysis to determine why this issue may have occurred
o Ask “why” at least five times until you reach the root cause of the problem
• Identify three strategies that nurses can implement to solve the problem or subsequent changes that can be made in their daily nursing practice to prevent practice errors and increase patient safety
2. Demonstrate critical reasoning by providing rationale and evidence to support your thoughts
• Utilize the resources found in Canvas or external resources
• Examples from professional practice may be provided as long as privacy and confidentiality are maintained (patient, health care team, and organization) to strengthen thoughts
Sample Solution
A mature health system takes into account the increasing complexity in health care settings that make humans more prone to mistakes. For example, a patient in hospital might receive a wrong medication because of a mix-up that occurs due to similar packaging. In this situation, a lack of standard procedures for storage of medications that look alike, poor communication between the different providers, lack of verification before medication administration and lack of involvement of patients in their own care might all be underlying factors that led to the occurrence of errors. Patient safety aims to prevent and reduce risks, errors and harm that occur to patients during provision of health care. A cornerstone of the discipline is continuous improvement based on learning from errors and adverse events. Patient safety is fundamental to delivering quality essential health services.
