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Patient Safety Essay

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Patient safety has always been an area of interest to me ever since I started to have an interest in the health care field. I think that patients are what keep organizations operating for years and years. Patients are our customers. Without them nurses, doctors, therapists, dieticians, nutritionists, to name a few, would be without a job. An organization needs to do everything possible to keep patients safe and reduce error. For example, if a patient goes to a hospital to get treatment and the staff keep making mistake after mistake then that patient isn 't going to want to return and will probably tell all his friends and family to not go to that hospital, which will result in a loss for the hospital and will probably have a bad …show more content…

In this situation by reporting the event, the organization can do something to fix the problem, maybe change the way that their medications are packaged or have two nurses to verify that the correct medication is given. Organizations should focus more on finding solutions instead of looking for people to blame.

When the Institute of Medicine came out with a report called To Err Is Human it drew a lot of attention to the media on patient safety because of the statistics that the report found. One of the big things that this report found was that "between 44,000 and 98,000 people died each year in the United States hospitals due to medical errors and adverse events" (Bonacum, 2017, p. 3). This was also one of the reasons why the Healthcare Research and Quality Act of 1999 passed. This act allowed research to be done using scientific evidence and report things such as effectiveness, outcomes, costs, quality, etc. in the health care field ("Healthcare Research and Quality Act of 1999," 2014). It is a good thing that the Institute of Medicine came out with this report because it made patient safety a very important issue that needed to be resolved, it was definitely an eye opener. The above number of people dying because of medical errors is surprisingly high, if I did my math correctly that’s about 122-272 people dying each day. Wow! There are other factors that

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