Safety is a core value of many different hospitals located around the world. In order to ensure the safety of their patients while they are hospitalized, patient safety programs are put into effect. These highly effective programs ensure that patients are receiving the best care possible along with quality and service while knowing that they are safe while staying in the facility. All patient safety programs found within licensed hospitals, surgical centers and private psychiatric hospitals must be approved by the facility’s governing body. In addition, all staff members of the hospital are required to receive proper training and patient safety education, no matter what their responsibilities may be.
Components of Patient Safety Programs
Patient safety programs, also known as PSP, must include several different components that ensure the overall safety of their patients that are hospitalized within their facility. This includes properly and effectively being able to communicate action plans with one another throughout the hospital, conducting root cause analysis, reporting all events and occurrences from all patients and staff members, reporting medical errors within a specific time frame and implementing consequences for those who fail to report events and occurrences as hospital policy requires.
Each one of these components works together to ensure that all staff members are doing their jobs correctly in order to keep their patients safe and healthy during their stay. With the patient safety program, you can rest assured that you will not be dealing with any medical errors or poor treatment while hospitalized in the facility.
Patient Safety Education
All hospitals, surgical centers and additional medical facilities are required to provide their staff members with the proper patient safety education courses and training. This is especially important for those staff members who have responsibilities that are related to the development and supervision of the patient safety program. During the patient safety education training courses, staff members will learn specific procedures for reporting medical errors and occurrences along with ensuring the overall safety of their patients.
Hospitals must also designate one or a team of individuals that have qualified training and experience to be responsible for the overall management of the patient safety program at their hospital. This team is typically responsible for organizing different events and training courses for staff members to improve their skills, coordinating each activity that is planned for the patient safety program, assessing and responding to reported occurrences, monitoring plans of action and more.
Goals of Patient Safety Programs
Patient safety programs have different goals to meet that are designed to improve patient safety. These goals focus on major problems within the healthcare facility and how they can be improved for the patients benefit. Some goals that may be implemented into your hospitals patient safety program include getting important test results to different staff members in a timely manner, labeling all medicines, recording correct information about patients and their medications, using guidelines to treat all infections and illnesses, ensuring that correct surgeries are done on different patients and using hand cleaning guidelines from the Center for Disease Control.