Quality and Safety Education for Nurses Patient safety

The issue of patient safety has been a concern to medics and the stakeholders in the health care system over many years. This has been propelled by constant emergence of life threatening injures to people visiting or working within the healthcare facilities s well as construction of buildings and entrances that do not meet the required standards of hospitals. This largely informs the basis of this paper to find out where the wrongs are and how these can be rectified to provide a good environment for patients.

Patient safety

The patient safety is as important as the rescue of the life of a patient when he walks into the hospital to seek medical attention. The nurses and doctors are hence required to adhere to the call of the Nursing and Midwifery Council of "Nurses and nursing staff manage risk, are vigilant about risk, and help to keep everyone safe in the places they receive health care" (Royal College of Nursing, 2014). The nurses are therefore required to ensure they curb infections, identify the patients correctly, use the medicines at their disposal correctly, avoid surgical errors at all costs, prevent venous thromboembolism (VTE), customize the discharges from the hospital, hospital should use good hospital designs to avoid falls and accidents, hospital should assemble netter teams and rapid response...

2014). There are however some unsafe practices that are experienced in the nursing fraternity that contributes to the unsafe environment like the workarounds that weaken the set procedures, dangerous abbreviations that would lead to wrong treatment, inappropriate interaction with patients, poor work ethics and generally inability to follow instructions and safety (Florence L., et.al., 2008). There are however emerging technologies that can make it possible to eliminate some of these errors by storing data of clients and matching them with prescriptions and all the necessary information to avoid misidentifications. These technologies include barcodes, Computer Provider Order Entry and even the electronic prescribing of drugs.
To improve the safety skills within the nursing fraternity, there is need to have a standard checklist that is appended to each unit and each patient to avoid workarounds. There is also need to ensure that there are forcing functions implemented by eliminating any drugs that are not prescribed for the treatment of a given patient from his room, there needs to be standardization of treatment procedures to ensure that there is no step that is bypassed by the nurses hence ensuring the…