Tips For Ensuring Patient Safety In Healthcare Settings!

Patients look up to the us, doctors as their life savers. They expect to be cured for their ailments and to be made whole again. However, doctors are humans and humans can make mistakes. A mistake made by a doctor can have serious implications on the patient’s health and hence must be avoided at all costs. A report by the WHO put medical errors amongst the top ten killers. It is said that 1 in every 10 patients admitted to a hospital will experience an adverse event. Thus, the WHO has also put down a few guidelines for patient safety, which not only doctors but patients must also take care of.

Here are a few tips you could consider.

1. Prevent the spread of infections: At any given point of time, 1.4 million people across the world suffer from infections caught in a hospital. Offering single bedrooms are an effective way to limit the transmission of infections from one patient to another. Also, pay attention to your air filtration system and provide multiple hand wash stations. Simple measures can also help reduce blood stream infections associated with a central line. Whenever a venous catheter needs to be inserted, wash your hands, clean the skin thoroughly, remove unnecessary lines and only then perform the insertion.
2. Pick Blood Donors carefully: Many surgical procedures and treatments require blood transfusions. If attention is not paid to testing blood before it is administered to the patient, there could be serious complications. It is the duty of the hospital to provide safe and sufficient blood supply. For this, the WHO recommends a proper assessment of blood donors and testing their suitability to donate blood at each occasion. Blood transfusion services should also be able to screen for diseases that can be transmitted through transfusion.
3. Use good design principles: A fall from a chair or bed can elongate a patient’s recovery. Hence, pay attention to how your hospital has been designed to reduce the risk of such events. Avoid steps and slippery tiles as far as possible. Sensitive bed and chair alarms could also be used to alert a nurse whenever a patient needs assistance. Nurse stations should also be decentralized so that the nurses have easy access to the patients. According to WHO guidelines, a hospital’s ventilation system should provide a minimum average ventilation rate of 60 l/s/patient for general wards.
4. Prevent surgical infections: Surgical infections are rare but they still can happen. To reduce the risk of surgical infections, doctors and nurses must sanitize their arms up to their elbows with antiseptic soap before performing surgery. According to WHO guidelines, hands must be washed for a minimum of 2 minutes before any procedure. Special, gowns, masks, hair covers and gloves must be used by anyone in the operation theatre. After surgery, the caregivers must again wash their hands and forearms with antiseptic soaps, even though their skin did not come in direct contact with the patient.

In case you have a concern or query you can always consult an expert & get answers to your questions!