Implementing safety practices in healthcare saves lives and improves the quality of care: it is therefore vital to apply good clinical practices, such as the WHO surgical checklist, to adopt the most appropriate measures for the prevention of assistance-related risks, and to identify the potential ones using tools such as reporting & learning systems. The culture of safety in the care environment and of human factors influencing it should be developed from the beginning of medical studies and in the first years of professional practice, in order to have the maximum impact on clinicians' and nurses' behavior. Medical errors tend to vary with the level of proficiency and experience, and this must be taken into account in adverse events prevention. Human factors assume a decisive importance in resilient organizations, and an understanding of risk control and containment is fundamental for all medical and surgical specialties. This open access book offers recommendations and examples of how to improve patient safety by changing practices, introducing organizational and technological innovations, and creating effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable care systems, in order to spread the quality and patient safety culture among the new generation of healthcare professionals, and is intended for residents and young professionals in different clinical specialties.

Principles of Risk Management and Patient Safety identifies changes in the industry and describes how these changes have influenced the functions of risk management in all aspects of healthcare. The book is divided into four sections. The first section describes the current state of the healthcare industry and looks at the importance of risk management and the emergence of patient safety. It also explores the importance of working with other sectors of the health care industry such as the pharmaceutical and device manufacturers. Important Notice: The digital edition of this book is missing some of the images or content found in the physical edition.

The harm associated with health care is a questionable issue and several systemic global strategies to reduce it with a safer system are being developed. Despite these efforts, errors continue to happen and one of the most important challenges is to become aware of its real dimension and process-occurrence. This book provides new research on patient safety and management. It discusses different perspectives, principles and reviews emerging issues in the medical field.

v. 1. Research findings -- v. 2. Concepts and methodology -- v. 3. Implementation issues -- v. 4. Programs, tools and products.

Building on the revolutionary Institute of Medicine reports To Err is Human and Crossing the Quality Chasm, Keeping Patients Safe lays out guidelines for improving patient safety by changing nurses' working conditions and demands. Licensed nurses and unlicensed nursing assistants are critical participants in our national effort to protect patients from health care errors. The nature of the activities nurses typically perform â€" monitoring patients, educating home caretakers, performing treatments, and rescuing patients who are in crisis â€" provides an indispensable resource in detecting and remedying error-producing defects in the U.S. health care system. During the past two decades, substantial changes have been made in the organization and delivery of health care â€" and consequently in the job description and work environment of nurses. As patients are increasingly cared for as outpatients, nurses in hospitals and nursing homes deal with greater severity of illness. Problems in management practices, employee deployment, work and workspace design, and the basic safety culture of health care organizations place patients at further risk. This newest edition in the groundbreaking Institute of Medicine Quality Chasm series discusses the key aspects of the work environment for nurses and reviews the potential improvements in working conditions that are likely to have an impact on patient safety.

"Nurses play a vital role in improving the safety and quality of patient car -- not only in the hospital or ambulatory treatment facility, but also of community-based care and the care performed by family members. Nurses need know what proven techniques and interventions they can use to enhance patient outcomes. To address this need, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), with additional funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has prepared this comprehensive, 1,400-page, handbook for nurses on patient safety and quality -- Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Nurses. (AHRQ Publication No. 08-0043)." - online AHRQ blurb, http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/nurseshdbk/

Patient safety is a predominant feature of quality healthcare and something that every patient has the right to expect. As a nurse, you must consider the safety of the patient as paramount in every aspect of your role; and it is now an increasingly important topic in pre-registration nursing programmes. This book aims to provide you with a greater understanding of how to manage patient safety and risk in your practice. The book focuses on the essentials that you need to know, and therefore provides a clear pathway through what can sometimes seem an overwhelmingly complex mass of rules, procedures and possible options. Key features: · A practical introduction to patient safety and risk management written specifically for nurses and nursing students · Case studies and scenarios help you to apply patient safety and risk management principles to actual practice · Each chapter is mapped to the relevant NMC standards and Essential Skills Clusters so that you can see how you are meeting the professional requirements · Activities throughout help you to think critically and reflect on practice.

This volume, developed by the Observatory together with OECD, provides an overall conceptual framework for understanding and applying strategies aimed at improving quality of care. Crucially, it summarizes available evidence on different quality strategies and provides recommendations for their implementation. This book is intended to help policy-makers to understand concepts of quality and to support them to evaluate single strategies and combinations of strategies.

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Still Not Safe is the story of the rise of the patient-safety movement- and how an "epidemic" of medical errors was derived from a reality that didn't support such a characterization. Physician Robert Wears and organizational theorist Kathleen Sutcliffe trace the origins of patient safety to the emergence of market trends that challenged the place of doctors in the larger medical ecosystem: the rise in medical litigation and physicians' aversion to risk; institutional changes in the organization and control of healthcare; and a bureaucratic movement to "rationalize" medical practice- to make a hospital run like a factory. Weaving together narratives from medicine, psychology, philosophy, and human performance, Still Not Safe offers a counterpoint to the presiding, doctor-centric narrative of contemporary American medicine.--book jacket