Ivette Fernandez
Role of Nursing in Developing a Safety Culture in Healthcare
Nursing plays a pivotal role in ensuring a culture of safety in healthcare. After physicians or doctors attend to patients, the bulk of the remaining work in guaranteeing the patient’s safety remains the onus of the nurses. As such, they are concerned with the individual wellness of their patients and that of the healthcare environment as a whole. A safety culture has four important facets, namely: the appreciation of high-risk dispensation of the nursing environment and commitment to ensure safety, creation of a blame-free work environment, committing resources to safety and persuading collaboration across ranks and disciplines to ensure safety (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2021).
An organization in which all the above conditions are met enables nurses to work so that detection of risks and dangers is as easy as reporting and correcting them before they escalate. In so doing, nurses and their leaders are helped by informatics, particularly health information technology (HIT). However, to promote a safety culture, professionals in this field have to understand that technology alone is not enough to guarantee safety (Simamora, 2020). Rather, its implementation should be done in a manner bereft of human errors. There could be a helpful technological tool to limit risks during operations, but if the execution is characterized by errors of omission and commission, then safety cannot be realized. Nursing does not end at the hospital level; it goes further to the community (Sloane et al., 2018). Therefore, nurses can also encourage a safe culture by designing means of education that reach the public in order to promote healthy behavior and tackle emerging health issues like childhood obesity.
In summary, safety has been a hot topic in healthcare for decades but has gathered pace in recent years in which nurses are increasingly under the microscope. The entire healthcare industry relies on nursing as far as maintaining a culture of safety is concerned. Therefore, nursing should establish innovative and responsive strategies to ensure success and compliance.
References
McGonigle, D., & Mastrian, K. (2021). Nursing informatics and the foundation of knowledge. Jones & Bartlett Publishers.
Simamora, R. H. (2020). Learning of patient identification in patient safety programs through clinical preceptor models. Medico-Legal Update, 20(3), 419-422.
Sloane, D. M., Smith, H. L., McHugh, M. D., & Aiken, L. H. (2018). Effect of changes in hospital nursing resources on improvements in patient safety and quality of care: a panel study. Medical care, 56(12), 1001.
Naiviv Barcelo
3/7/22, 4:27 AM
Technology plays a key role in education and nursing work, so it is very necessary to study role of nurses and the need for appropriate information technology educational programs to integrate with technological advancement (Alotaibi & Federico, 2017). The role of a nurse informatics is to provide information about workflow, guide new technology and process implementation, and assessing data quality as well as giving care teams the best chance of optimal care delivery. Errors still occur despite much emphasis kept on patient safety. Patients may receive the wrong medication all as a result of combination of high risk actions and conditions causing increase in morbidity and mortality rates.
An analysis of patient safety events allows PSOs to recognize problems, reduce and eliminate hazards and risks that affect patient safety. In addition, most clinicians do not report patient safety reports since they fear being held accountable. The most challenging job in healthcare is guaranteeing patient safety. Nursing informatics has transformed care delivery by improving coordination of care through providing patients access to the information they need (Singh, Javaid, Haleem, Vaishya & Bahl, 2020). Patient portals and engagement tools which include wearable devices like home insulin monitors are used to ass patient- generated data to medical records. Nevertheless informatics allows healthcare administrators to tailor incentive plan to patients. Moreover, Electronic Health records analyze and collect health care information thus promoting better diagnostics achieved through communication.
Reference
Alotaibi, Y. K., & Federico, F. (2017). The impact of health information technology on patient safety. Saudi medical journal, 38(12), 1173.
Singh, R. P., Javaid, M., Haleem, A., Vaishya, R., & Bahl, S. (2020). Significance of Health Information Technology (HIT) in context to COVID-19 pandemic: Potential roles and challenges. Journal of Industrial Integration and Management, 5(04), 427-440.
