The paradigm shift of value-based care implies that a healthcare facility must focus on the quality of the provided care services and patient outcomes as the primary metrics of successful operations. This is an essential element of addressing the current issues within the healthcare domain since the approach focuses on the outcomes. This paper will describe a strategy for improving patient safety outcomes and outline the implementation process.
My organization is currently in the process of adapting its operations to suit the standards of value-based care in regards to patient safety. The administration assesses essential metrics such as length of stay, number of patients, readmissions, satisfaction rates, and other vital metrics, which also emphasize the quality of services. For instance, the rate of readmissions is an important criterion that allows healthcare establishments to determine if their services address concerns of a particular patient. With this in mind, one can argue that the organizational culture does not merely rely on the metrics and set benchmarks, it is also essential to ensure that the people working in the facility understand the importance of value-based care, and to accomplish this I identified one opportunity for quality improvement.
A healthcare setting is subjected to errors as a high-risk facility. However, these mistakes affect the health and well-being of the patients, making it necessary to ensure that potential hazards are addressed in advance. In this regard, near misses, or cases when a mistake could have happened but did not serve as an essential element of patient safety improvement. According to Spall, Kassam, and Tollefson (2015), “the systematic reporting and analysis of near-misses, commonplace in HROs, can be adapted to health care settings to prevent adverse events and improve clinical outcomes” (p. 292). Therefore, a patient safety improvement initiative proposed in this paper is the near misses reporting and investigation system.
The implementation of this system requires hiring professionals, responsible for analyzing the cases where patient harm could have taken place and identifying areas of improvement. Based on these findings, the healthcare establishment will be able to improve its current operations by addressing areas of high risk. The main issue is the need to develop and implement a reporting system, where the hospital’s employees will be able to describe the cases.
Current technology used to support patient safety is focused on examining medical errors and criteria such as readmission rates. These cases can be reported to a supervisor through reporting software. The unintended consequence of this approach is the lack of attention to the instances where a mistake could have occurred because of a systemic error, such as a flawed system. Moreover, the focus on reporting only errors creates a culture where healthcare professionals are afraid to report their mistakes or possible misjudgments due to a fear of being under investigation. These cases are unnoticed by the hospital’s management, and if they are a result of a systemic error, it is possible that they ill occur in the future.
To address this issue, the hospital has to emphasize continuous improvement and the fact that near-misses are used to enhance the current safety practices and not punish the employees. A critical case that illustrates this need is a patient recovering after surgery, who underwent a cardiac arrest. The cardiopulmonary resuscitation was successful, however, the team lost a lot of time identifying the drugs that were administered to this patient because the syringes were unlabeled. Due to the focus n quantity and not quality, the anesthesiologist used syringes that did not have labels on them. Overall, this paper examined the paradigm shift within healthcare, which requires healthcare facilities to focus on value instead of volume.
Reference
Van Spall, H., Kassam, A., & Tollefson, T. T. (2015). Near-misses are an opportunity to improve patient safety. Current Opinion in Otolaryngology & Head and Neck Surgery, 23(4), 292–296. Web.