Every year in India, thousands of patients die due to avoidable hospital errors and lack of safety measure. Safety in hospital building design can improve team performance and avoid errors by limiting harm and reducing the likeliness of mistakes.
Here is the list of 5 factors that top health organisations implement to achieve the safety goal for patients.
1. Restraint infection spread
The practice of washing and sanitise hands before contacting patients is a good practice to restrict the transfer of virus and bacteria. According to the health care association data, infections are the most common serious hospital complication that causes some serious health issue to patients.
Thus, healthcare providers should clean their hands before and after contacting patient contact so that they can protect themselves as well as their patients from infections.
2. Correct Patient Identification
Recording patients’ correct information confirmed that he/she receives the service or procedure can prevent various harmful events like administering the wrong medication or blood product to a patient. Thus, the patient information should be collected accurately.
3. Use Medicine Carefully
The availability of the enormous number of prescription drugs in the market can cause medical errors in any medical facilities and cause some serious consequences. To avoid such errors, label all the drugs and syringes carefully.
While labelling the drugs, make sure that any medicine doesn’t conflict with the current ones. Also, take some extra precautions with the patient on the blood thinner.
4. Customise hospital discharges
Customising easy to follow plans for patients like medication routine, the record of essential medicines and data of patients before discharge. Such steps before discharging patient can reduce the potentially preventable readmissions up to 30 per cent.
5. Avoid surgical mistakes
Under the pressure of operation, the operating room can become a chaotic environment if there is a miscommunication during the procedure. Plus, physical fatigue and other negligence can put disaster for patients in the operating room.
Whatever the cause of mistakes, it can leave patients with serious injuries that he/she may deal with for the rest of their life. Using the periodic timeouts strategy is a great way to avoid these mistakes.
The timeout break gives enough time to surgeons to revise their operating procedures and allow staff to consider all pieces of equipment.