Introduction
Health care policies are principles and goals that provide guidelines on how care can be accessed or delivered. Patient care is one policy that has ensured that health care is provided best to the targeted parties (Bates & Singh, 2018). The policy provides a framework for the expectation of each stakeholder and helps a health facility meet the legal requirements and safety measures of a health facility. This paper will explore the patient safety policy, its stakeholders, and the ethical considerations of the policy.
Stakeholders in the Patient Care Program
Stakeholders are parties who provide, receive, pay, or manage a particular policy. In this case, the stakeholders in patient safety include the patient, nurses, researchers, and nursing educators. The stakeholders can be divided into internal and external stakeholders (Rauch, 2019). Internal stakeholders comprise those involved in providing health care directly. They include the nurses, physicians, physiotherapists, pharmacists, and other health specialists that directly offer health care.
External stakeholders include the patients, government health institutions, and health care insurance providers, among others. They mainly play a significant supportive role in enhancing change by providing the required resources. Patients are the service users in this case and are the main reason why the policy is enacted. The government ensures that the necessary health facilities enhance the process (Müller et al., 2018). They offer other assistance such as financial assistance through paying the service lenders like the nurses. Financial aid is also given by various insurance companies, which take care of the financial requirements of the patients at large.
Ethical Considerations and their Solutions
There are four primary ethical considerations in patient safety that ensure that activities are implemented orderly. First is informed consent, where a person participating in a particular activity is informed fully about what is expected. In this case, a nurse, for example, needs to be well conversant with their day-to-day roles. These roles include administering drugs at the specified time and ensuring that the patient is attended to entirely without delays. Do no harm is another consideration that needs to be considered (Billmann et al., 2020). A patient can receive both physical and psychological damage. This can be through pain, stress, anxiety, invasion of privacy, and lowering of self-esteem. Therefore, the service lenders should ensure that they do not interfere with a patient’s peace. This can be achieved if the approach used when the nurse is interacting with the patient is appropriate.
Consequently, confidentiality is another aspect that is critical in this policy. Confidentiality deals with the patient’s privacy of private information. The service user’s privacy needs to be observed; for example, a patient’s disorder should be confidential (Alotaibi & Federico, 2017). Consequently, accessing the most relevant components is another important ethical issue to be taken into account. It is good to note that patients’ instincts vary from one individual to another. Some do not like sharing their information with other people and, therefore, might be tempted to be offensive to the nurses and other health practitioners (Alotaibi & Federico, 2017). It is essential that a service lender responsively makes inquiries when attending to clients. In case of a patient act impolitely, the health practitioner should not get infuriated with the person but instead look for other courteous ways of handling the situation.
Conclusion
In conclusion, patient care is a policy that ensures that the welfare of the sick individual is well catered for appropriately. For any health facility, patients are the main stakeholders, and therefore they need to be provided with all the necessary care. The primary way of ensuring that the client receives the best services is by considering the ethical issues outlined in the policy. By so doing, patients will receive the desired care, and their safety will be guaranteed.
References
Alotaibi, Y. K., & Federico, F. (2017). The impact of health information technology on patient safety. Saudi Medical Journal, 38(12), 1173.
Bates, D. W., & Singh, H. (2018). Two decades since to err is human: An assessment of progress and emerging priorities in patient safety.Health Affairs, 37(11), 1736-1743.
Billmann, M., Böhm, M., & Krcmar, H. (2020). Use of workplace health promotion apps: Analysis of employee log data. Health Policy and Technology, 9(3), 285-293.
Müller, M., Jürgens, J., Redaèlli, M., Klingberg, K., Hautz, W. E., & Stock, S. (2018). Impact of the communication and patient hand-off tool SBAR on patient safety: A systematic review.BMJ Open, 8(8), 1-10.
Rauch, S. (2019). Medicalizing the disclosure of mental health: Transnational perspectives of ethical workplace policy among healthcare workers. World Medical & Health Policy, 11(4), 424-439.