Recognizing that health care errors affect at least one in every 10 patients around the world, the World Health Organization’s World Alliance for Patient Safety and the Collaborating Centre identified priority program areas related to patient safety. What are the patient safety program areas the nurse manager should consider for implementation?

Dq8case Study, Chapter 14, Medical Errors: An ongoing Threat

The World Health Organization’s (WHO) World Alliance for Patient Safety and the Collaborating Centre have identified 8 priority program areas related to patient safety. There are eight areas of patient safety that have been identified by the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Collaborating Centre: 1) safety for medication; 2) prevention and control of infection; (3) hospital-acquired diseases; 4) safety in obstetrics care; 5 surgical safety, 6 diagnostic errors; 7 identification and identification of patients; 8 safety for healthcare workers.

To ensure that patients and workers are safe, nurse managers must implement programs to address these issues. In order to ensure medication safety, nurse managers should implement programs that focus on each of these areas.

For example, infection prevention can be achieved by ensuring that the correct sterilization technique is used to clean instruments and equipment. Also, proper hand washing procedures using alcohol-based sanitizers should be followed between patients. In order to identify any increases in hospital acquired infections, including inadequate staffing or resources to support safe practices, it is important to monitor the incidence rate closely.

In obstetrics, interventions can focus on the development of protocols for continuous monitoring of a fetus during labour or educational material regarding neonatal resuscitation. The surgical team should be trained regularly on team dynamics, such as communication between team members, and how to confirm the correct identity of patients before surgery using several identifiers, including name, date of birth, medical record number, etc.

The management of diagnostic errors must include issues such as overordering due to lack of timely access, incomplete data and misinterpretation from lab test investigations. Nurses must use two unique identifiers to confirm patient identity.