Know About The Significance Of Patient Safety Awareness Week
Patient Safety Awareness Week is a national ceremony which is funded by the National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) for the purpose of building awareness for bringing an improvement in patient safety standards. The NPSF is celebrating Patient Safety Awareness Week from 6-12 March. The sole aim of this annual event is to draw attention to the importance of improved patient safety initiatives for the general welfare of the patients. Another area of focus for NPSF is medication errors and hospital readmission rates. NPSF is focusing on ways that can help to reduce these issues by maintaining better communication among those in the nursing field, patients and their family members.
The lives of patients depend upon the safety standards that are followed in a health care organization. A patient may or may not survive even after giving the medical facilities but the death of any patient should not be because of any carelessness or negligence on the part of the hospital. To make this happen, each and every hospital is visited by compliance officers and quality assurance officers who go all the way to ensure that the hospital is the healthcare standards set by NPSF. A compliance officer can be contacted in case a person is not satisfied by the health care services provided in a hospital.
The patient safety initiatives taken by Joint Commission for Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations requires for the hospital to create a caring environment in which a patient can get the best possible care by enabling proper communication among health care workers, patients and their visitors. The execution of a proper procedure of information collection and evaluation can go a long way in avoiding adverse and unexpected events like drugs and surgical errors, patient fall or any injury when the patient is undergoing treatment.
Some of the initiatives that have been taken in ensuring patient safety include the use of electronic systems rather than paper charts for recording any information about the patient. This helps in avoiding any error that occurs because of writing wrong information. Providing a patient with a bracelet with a bar code when entering the emergency room helps in correctly identifying a person thereby eliminating surgical errors of mistaken identity. It is a known fact that thousands of patients lose their life every year because of medication errors that can be avoided by providing special training for the nurses. The families of the patients also need to be a bit more careful and clear away any doubt they have regarding medications. Another initiative that can be adopted by the hospitals is implementation of proper alarm system which can alert the nurses in case of any emergency.
Patient Safety Awareness Week, which was started by NPSF in the year 2002 focuses in making an effort to involve patients and health care providers to ensure that health care errors do not occur. Health care organizations throughout the world are making their contribution in celebrating Patient Safety Awareness Week and spreading awareness about it through posters, brochures, stickers, etc.
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