Patient Safety is a healthcare discipline, which has been created to prevent the risks, errors, and damages that patients may suffer when attending a healthcare service, either in the hospital or at home. This discipline tries to continuously improve healthcare systems and the services provided for people's health through all the mistakes previously made and any problems that may arise.
Patient Safety is a global health priority, preventing accidents, illnesses, and unnecessary deaths worldwide. Patient safety has the objective of recording, analyzing, and preventing failures that can cause problems and risks to the health and life of patients.
From doctor errors, and drug manufacturing errors, to accidents and hospital-acquired infections, patient safety can always be improved in a hospital setting, so that patients feel that their health is not compromised due to poor procedures by healthcare personnel.
Read About World Health and Safety Day
Why is Patient Safety Important?
In recent decades there has been much discussion that patients should always be the center of healthcare services. That is to say, all services should be patient-centered, of high quality, effective and safe.
Patient safety is important because caregivers are responsible for the well-being of their patients. It is important that the risks, errors, and damages that could occur to a person are reduced as much as possible, and in this way, improve the quality of all health services.
The most important thing to understand about patient safety is that errors tend to occur when there is no job satisfaction, when there is not enough rest of the health personnel, or when there is no attention to the procedure being performed. Most of the time, enriching the lives of the healthcare professionals makes it possible for patient safety to be more present in the workplace, and thus, provide better care.
How Can Nurses and Healthcare Workers Keep Patients Safe?
The nursing staff (registered nurses or RNs, certified nursing assistants or CNAs, Licensed practical nurses or LPNs) are the ones who are most in contact with the patients, and who pay the most attention to each of them. It is important to be able to observe changes in the patient all the time, and the one who interacts directly with the doctors, patients, medications, families, and allied healthcare workers is the nursing staff.
The nursing staff will be in charge of detecting errors if there are any, observing weaknesses, identifying changes in the patient's condition, and trying to detect deterioration or clinical improvement, so a large part of patient safety is precisely in the hands of the nursing staff.
For these reasons, it is expected that the working conditions of nursing staff and healthcare workers are actively being improved to ensure quality care. When patient safety is implemented in healthcare facilities, we can see how care improves and patients follow their treatments better, and all kinds of preventable problems are avoided. Happier clinicians do provide better care.
What is Valued Based Healthcare?
It is a healthcare delivery framework that incentivizes healthcare services to focus precisely on the high quality of the healthcare they provide, rather than quantity. When valued-based healthcare is implemented, it works on preventing the progression of a disease, rather than focusing on the number of treatments and patients that a healthcare professional delivers. In addition, valued-based healthcare seeks to improve an individual's quality of life through multidisciplinary care and recognition of teamwork, all through evidence-based medicine.
When many professionals can focus on the patient, and importance is given to rest, pay, and quality of life for both the patient and the healthcare professional, the quality of services increases, errors decrease and more patients feel encouraged to present themselves and be treated at healthcare facilities. In general, the quality of life of the population improves, and more people are treated with confidence and security.Nursa™ is an application that connects healthcare professionals with the workplaces where they are needed. Nursa™ works with the intention of improving the salary of these professionals, and improving their quality of life: by having better pay per hour, the health professional can work less and earn more, rest better, choose their schedules, spend more quality time with their family, and through all the steps that improve their life, safely and quality care for patients every day. Try the app today, and work choosing your shifts, with a better salary, and with opportunities to keep growing and providing the best care possible.
