An Interesting Q&A Session Regarding Patient Safety
During the last decade or so, patient safety has become one of the biggest global concerns in hospitals and other healthcare facilities. In an effort to address and deal with this issue, the World Health Organization (WHO) Patient Safety Program has introduced its Safer Primary Care project. The World Alliance for Patient Safety will also be launching its core program, which will be known as the Global Patient Safety Challenge.
Current Trends in Healthcare and Patient Safety
According to Professor Lars-Peter Kamolz and Dr. Gerald Sendholfer, who are both Editors-in-Chief of an upcoming journal Safety in Health, there is an overall trend that involves implementing activities and campaigns in a bid to help improve patient safety levels. This also results in safety levels improving for hospital employees and the organizations that they are working for as well. While general checklists have been used during discharge, surgery and handover procedures, additional simulation techniques, a range of computer-based solutions as well as patient empowerment (in Europe) have been added to help boost safety levels further than ever before.
Potential Safety Challenges
During the 1990s, it was reported that as many as 1 in 10 patients were experiencing adverse effects as a result of medical errors being made in hospitals. As a result, the World Health Organization recognized this breach of patient safety as an extremely serious concern. However, it has also been noted that there is a serious lack when it comes to obtaining funding to cover the cost of safety-related research. To show that there has been progress in the realm of patient safety, it is essential to identify interventions that reduce the occurrence of adverse events. Various tools also need to be developed to measure the effectiveness of improvements that have been made.
Implementing National Strategies
Safety in Health focuses much of its attention on global trends that have the potential to affect the safety of hospital patients. The European Commission, World Health Organization and a few other official organizations have made suggestions regarding the implementation of national strategies in a bid to address important issues regarding patient safety. It has been suggested that information pertaining to this issue should be made freely available for anyone who is interested this would also help increase visibility of the information for individual authors as well.
A Closer Look at the Journal
The Safety in Health journal would provide healthcare managers with the opportunity to encourage the sharing of information pertaining to safety aspects for patients as well as current global healthcare trends. Authors would hold the copyrights to any of their works that are published in the journal. The topic of patient safety has been classified as a distinct healthcare discipline that is supported by a developing scientific framework.
The resulting amount of knowledge pertaining to the safety of patients will certainly be of great benefit to everyone involved namely, patients, doctors, nurses and hospital administration employees. In years to come, it is hoped that the amount of adverse events that occur in hospitals will decrease even further, thanks to this wealth of shared knowledge.