Medication Errors: Why We Must Look Beyond the “Five Rights”
Medication errors are a widespread concern in healthcare, and they can have severe consequences for patients. The five rights of medication...
2 min read
Performance Health Partners
January 13, 2022
With the increasing demands on healthcare providers today, even the most skilled and well-trained professionals can make mistakes. Incidents or adverse events in an already high-risk industry can significantly impact patients and providers. Therefore, risk mitigation is crucial for preventing future incidents and improving patient safety.
Here's how the patient incident report affects risk management and why incident reporting is vital to patient safety in every healthcare organization.
In a perfect world, all incidents that cause or have the potential to cause patient harm would be perfectly documented and managed appropriately. Unfortunately, however, we don't live in a perfect world. Therefore, it's not surprising that submitting a patient incident report may be overlooked. Regardless of the reason, underreporting challenges impact risk management strategies and practices.
Understanding and improving outcomes require evaluating successes and failures. There are several reasons providers and healthcare staff do not report incidents. Do you know what they are? Some reasons could be:
Decreasing risk is the responsibility of the entire healthcare organization. According to the American Hospital Association when all clinical and non-clinical staff collaborate effectively, health care teams can improve patient outcomes, prevent medical errors, improve efficiency and increase patient satisfaction. This means when healthcare providers work together to provide the best patient care, risk is considerably lowered.
In addition, encouraging employees to complete an incident report provides management with the necessary information to improve the quality of services, track trends, and limit the possibility of repeat occurrences.
Collecting and analyzing the data from a patient incident report is crucial for preventing future incidents and improving patient safety. Incident reporting:
Collecting patient incident report data is just the first step in the incident management process. Data derived from incidents are valuable in understanding how to mitigate risk exposure and reduce harm.
Performance Health Partners raises the bar with incident reporting. Our incident reporting system provides healthcare organizations with a customizable, seamless, and manageable solution to improve patient safety.
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