Patient safety is a critical concept in healthcare, focusing on the prevention of harm caused due to the provision of medical care. Take the case of Fatima, a 28-year-old woman from Cairo, who went for routine appendix removal surgery but developed a severe infection due to the surgical team’s neglect of hand hygiene protocols. This case exemplifies the need for improved patient safety protocols, especially in resource-limited settings. Patient safety entails the implementation of practices and systems to prevent harm during healthcare provision, and its primary principle is ‘first, do no harm’. It differs from medical quality in that it specifically focuses on preventing harm from medical care.
World Health Organization (WHO) defines patient safety as the absence of preventable harm during healthcare provision and the reduction of unnecessary healthcare-related risks. Globally, as many as 4 in 10 patients are harmed during outpatient healthcare, with 80% of the harm preventable. In hospitals, at least 1 in 10 patients are harmed during care. The economic burden of patient safety failures is enormous, with an estimated annual cost of $1.6 trillion died to medical expenses, loss of productivity, litigation due to medical errors, and healthcare-associated infections which rank among the top causes of death and disability worldwide.
Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), medication errors, surgical errors, diagnostic errors are common types of patient safety problems. HAIs cause harm to hundreds of millions of patients yearly, with occurrences exponentially higher in low resource settings such as developing countries. Medication errors, which include wrong medication, dose, patient, or time, cause at least one daily death in the US alone. Surgical errors are also a common problem, with complications affecting about 25% of patients globally.
Patient safety problems have multiple interactions, not just individual mistakes, involving system failures, human factors, environmental influences, and organizational culture. Shortage or inappropriate allocation of resources can contribute to these problems. Addressing patient safety demands systematic interventions, adopting evidence-based practices such as hand hygiene, surgical safety checklists, medication safety protocols, and patient engagement, among others, which can dramatically improve patient safety.
WHO is leading the global patient safety initiatives by providing countries with a framework to implement patient safety improvements. Initiatives such as the Global Patient Safety Action Plan 2021-2030, Hand Hygiene Campaigns, Global Patient Safety Challenge, and Patient Safety Incident Reporting and Learning System are intended to prevent common patient safety issues such as patient identification errors, communication failures during handovers, medication errors, and healthcare-associated infections. Achieving patient safety requires political commitment prioritizing safety, investing in infrastructure, training healthcare workers in safety practices, engaging patients in safety efforts, and learning from errors.
Source: https://observervoice.com/patient-safety-preventing-harm-in-healthcare-settings-181565/