Term Paper on "Current Issues in Quality and Safety"

/>Patient safety is an essential and vital component in the health care delivery. While there are high importance attached to the patient safety in the Unite States, healthcare professionals face many challenges in delivering quality healthcare that could enhance safety in the U.S. healthcare sector. Evidence still shows that healthcare practice in the United States is still prone to errors and the issues could be detrimental to patient safety. To enhance patient safety, healthcare professionals, nursing educators and the stakeholders are responsible for the delivery of quality health that should enhance the safety of the patients. (Ballard, 2003).

One of the quality and patient safety issues that have been the concern of political leaders and healthcare professionals in the United States is the incident of medical error. The Institute of Medicine (2001) argues that the nation healthcare system is detrimental to safe patient care because the country healthcare delivery is prone to errors. (Car, Black, Anandan, et al. 2008). Errors could occur when planned sequence of physical activities and mental activities fail to achieve the planned outcome. Sitterding (2011) reveals that medical errors continue to threaten quality healthcare delivery and patient safety. Constant occurrence of error incident has continued to erode the public confidence in the healthcare sector in the United States.

To provide greater understanding on the quality and health safety issues, the paper considers the quality and safety issues that the researcher encounters within his organization.

Quality and Safety issues within Stanford Hospital and Clinics

The researcher is one of the staff of Stanford Hospital and Clinics in California. Stanford Hospital and Clinics is one of the best hospitals in the United States, and ranked 14 in adult specialist hospital. Stanford Hospital and Clinics is known worldwide for the treatment of cancer, cardiovascular, neuroscience and organ transplants. To enhance quality and safety within the hospital, Stanford Hospital and Clinics always engages in medical research. The hospital understands that the incident of medical error is one of the issues that could decline quality of healthcare delivery as well as reducing patient safety. Typically, Stanford Hospital and Clinics is committed to provide quality healthcare delivery. Various steps that Stanford Hospital and Clinics employed to minimize the error incident within the hospital are as follows:

To minimize the medical error, Stanford Hospital and Clinics makes quality data available to medical staff. Management of Stanford Hospital and Clinics believes that quality data pulled from the clinical records is very important in the patient treatment. Typically, a practitioner requires timely and accurate information in order to provide accurate diagnosis. Error is highly minimize within the hospital because if a practitioner makes an error during documentation process, the issue could lead to negative effect on the rating of the Stanford Hospital and Clinics. To address the incident of error within the organization, Stanford Hospital and Clinics implements a state-of-the-art electronic documentation. The hospital also provides training for the healthcare practitioners to ensure… READ MORE