Today our topic of discussion is Five Steps to Improve Patient Safety.
Five Steps to Improve Patient Safety
Here are five steps that will improve overall hospital safety and lead to increasing patient satisfaction:
1.Remove stored equipment from public areas: A common practice in hospitals is to make hallways a storage area for equipment in waiting. Risks can be high when unforeseen situations happen, such as when a visitor trips over a cart wheel that is protruding into the walkway, or a rushing staff member hurriedly comes around a corner, falling due to IV poles and monitors left in the pathway.
If there is no alternative, only minimum equipment needed should be tolerated. Good planning and a commitment to safety must drive creative and effective storage options that are far safer than hallways
2. Minimize hospital room clutter: In her Notes on nursing (1860), Florence Nightingale said that nothing in the patient’s room should prevent the nurse from seeing dust and dirt for fear of insidious contamination. In the hospital room, this means keeping clutter away, properly storing or removing clothing, meals trays, and basically everything not immediately needed or being used.
Maintaining a clean and un-encumbered patient room is essential to keep the patient safe. “Clean” in this case is not only about “cleaning,” but, as stated, involves putting away or removing those things that are not serving the immediate patient needs.
This may be challenging but should be mandatory. Patients and families will appreciate the need for keeping the room safe and will participate in order to minimize preventable risk.
3. Eliminate or organize area clutter: Nursing stations must be well managed so that everything that needs to be seen can be seen. Cluttered desks are layered, often with both essential and non-essential items; if there are layers, much of what is there cannot be seen.
Organize the paperwork so that it can be found, but don’t let piles of records hide themselves in plain view of everyone else. Trust in the confidentiality of individual medical records is threatened when desks are piled high with patient records or other paperwork
4. Assure overall cleanliness of all areas: What is cluttered does not look clean; what is not clean, looks cluttered. A study showed hospitals that were perceived to be unclean had a 10% higher rate of infection. Perception confirms the otherwise invisible reality.
Stains in carpets, privacy curtains, unkempt bathrooms, lingering meal trays and housekeeping carts tell a tale of sloppiness that cannot be tolerated. This includes public bathrooms as well as patient toileting areas.
5. Minimize auditory clutter: Considering unnecessary noise as auditory clutter puts into perspective the risks for patients and staff. Ambient noise in the hospital, regardless of source, has been associated with everything from sleep deprivation to medication errors, from patient falls to breaches in confidentiality.
Because the general noise occurs in the same frequency range as the spoken voice, it is easy for words to be misunderstood. Sound-alike drugs and sound-alike instructions spoken into a sea of babble, invite errors and subsequent mistakes in practice. If every individual paid attention to where they were and remembered what was at stake, noise would be far more manageable.