Patient Safety in Healthcare
Joyce Kimeu
Chamberlain College of Nursing
NR101: Transition in Nursing
June 04, 2015

Patient Safety in Healthcare
Many errors can be avoided by having safety measures in place. Sign up to Safety campaign reveals that a million people use the services of the National Health Services (NHS) every 36 hours, with the majority being given care that is both safe and of high quality (NHS England, 2014). However, sometimes mistakes occur and patients are harmed as a result. Sign up to safe campaign shows that between 2011 and 2012, a total of 326 ’never events’ were reported to strategic health authorities (Glasper, 2014).This number can be reduced by addressing different safety measures, such as building a safety culture, leading and supporting staff, promote reporting, learning and sharing safety lessons and implementing solution to prevent harm (Glasper, 2014).
Building Safety Culture
An important component of a successful strategy to address these kinds of safety problems is the encouragement of personnel to be more forthcoming in reporting and disclosing errors, actual harm, and fear of being bullied. This instance will apply to all staff members, and everyone involved in caring for patient will know that their voices will be heard. For instance, where the leadership is concerned by being proactive, gaining input from the staffs about the improvements needed and addressing them with efficiency and urgency.
Leading and Supporting Staff
One of the ways to develop and support staff is by empowering them to make ecisions.by developing plans that detail how they will make necessary changes to reduce harmful patient safety incidents such as medication errors. For example, most medication errors today are due to the acuity level of patient to nursing ration whereby due to lack of sufficient staff we find that nurses are rushed to finish their shift and hence not paying much attention to the five rights of medication administration: right person, right time, right medication, right dosage and right route. The other most crucial and important aspect is nursing and pharmacy interaction through periodic in – services whereby issues such as transcription errors are discussed, intravenous (IV) administration errors are discussed in details to allow for proper training. In developing these plans, organizations are asked to liaise with service users and to reassure themselves that the focus of their plans has the full agreement of the community they serve.

Learning and Sharing Safety Lessons
Communication errors are the most rampant course of adverse events in healthcare. Either the information does not reach the right person, or it is inaccurate or issues remain unresolved until they become critical. (Oak, Dave, Garasia, & Parelkar, 2015). For instance, in the operating theatres, this leads to inefficient use of resources; wasted equipment, frustration, poor morale, delays, complications, raise in morbidity and cancelled operation. (Oak et al., 2015).

Conclusion In conclusion, to ensure the sustainability of the health service, learn and share safety lessons must be encouraged. The concept of implementing solution to prevent patient harm should be established. The annual Safety day or week could be considered as a mechanism to help all staff, patients and the local community focus together on safety.

References
Oak, S., Dave, N., Garasia, M., & Parelkar, S. (2015). Surgical checklist application and its impact on patient safety in pediatric surgery . Journal of Postgraduate Medicine 61(2), 92-94.
Glasper, A. (2014). Signing up to safety: Can the nursing profession contribute? British Journal of Nursing, 1224-1225.