Dennis Begos Shares The Top Tips to Prevent Medical Errors in Hospitals
Secure medication practice in hospitals starts with prioritizing medication security and departmental and also organization. Hospitals and healthcare providers must create a well-structured program and also nominate a medication security leader to maintain a robust structure of secure medical practices. Some elements that assist in this goal are components of safety culture that consist of an interdisciplinary medical security team and event-reporting system. Hospitals should also investigate medical errors and work to minimize them.
Dennis Begos explains medical errors
Medical errors can include blunders in surgery, medicine, home treatment, diagnosis, lab reports, and also devices. Lack of correct communication also leads to such mistakes leading to severe injury or death. A few examples are:
- Operating the wrong section of the patient’s body
- Giving a patient the wrong medicine or the wrong medicine dose
- Providing the wrong meal to a patient in the hospital
- Organizing a wrong lab test or diagnosis
- Not comprehending the doctor’s instruction and undertaking a wrong medical move
- A sudden medical device failure
The corrective strategies
The Physician Insurers Association of America recorded medical errors for 828 pediatric cases between 2003 and 2012. Furthermore, a Johns Hopkins study in 2016, claimed medical errors led to over 250,000 deaths annually in the United States. Dennis Begos, a medical expert, lists down crucial strategies to prevent such errors:
- Minimize diagnostic errors
Diagnostic errors are critical. To resolve this, radical healthcare system changes are essential. According to a National Academies’ monograph, titled “Improving Diagnosis in Health Care,” the probable solutions include an increased reliance on clinical support tools. Hospitals should optimally leverage teamwork and also enhance healthcare education to fine-tune diagnostic accuracy and also insight. Furthermore, the monograph also highlights the need to create a public liability and reporting system, which assists the diagnostic process. It should also help to design a care delivery and payment model that encourages patient visits, instead of delaying the same.
2.Creating a safety culture
The Myers Park Pediatrics Error Reduction Project successfully developed a security model that can work correctly in the majority of ambulatory pediatric settings. Acknowledging the chances of pediatric mistakes is essential to reduce and prevent the same by developing a multidisciplinary team. Additionally, non-punitive reporting enhances minor medical error detection. The medical team can successfully cater to the daily review reporting forms, brainstorm on errors, and come up with solutions, subject to tests. Once the solutions prove to be effective, it gets upgraded as a policy. If not, it gets re-evaluated
3.Minimizing medication errors
Approximately 10% of pediatric medicines lead to medication mistakes. This problem was reported in the October 2017 issue of Contemporary Pediatrics. Healthcare providers can implement measures to avert such errors. Dosing charts should get disseminated for over-the-counter medication to parents. Additionally, healthcare providers should affirm the patient’s weight before writing a prescription. The weight-based dose should supersede the recommended adult dose. Furthermore, the prescriptions should state the precise dose potency and the medication volume that needs administration.
One of the primary contributors to severe medical errors is miscommunication amongst staff during shifts. According to the U.S Joint Commission, it leads to deaths and also severe health hazards instead of recovery. Hospitals should check checklists to ensure correct information exchange and also reduce medical errors.