The Risks Associated With Hospital Operations Essay

Exclusively available on Available only on IvyPanda® • No AI

Table of Contents

Main Points of the Report
Key Findings of the Report
Recommendations
References

Main Points of the Report

The current report provides a detailed analysis of risks about the operation of the given hospital (Hospital Authority, 2015). The risks that are identified are mainly clinical, i.e., they are primarily related to medical rather than managerial aspects of the hospital’s operation. The severity of these risks is also assessed. Finally, the report provides recommendations about the ways which may be used to address the risks which were identified.

Key Findings of the Report

The risks which were identified in the current report, as well as their severity and the possible ways of addressing them, are summarized in Table 1 below (Hospital Authority, 2015). The problems are listed in the order of their priority, from the most important to the least important one.

#	The Risk	The Crux of the Risk	Possible Ways of Addressing the Risk
1	Safety of medicines used	Certain medications which are commonly utilized in the given hospital tend to often cause allergic reactions among patients	Revise the list of medications which are commonly prescribed by the personnel of the hospital and attempt to find analogs which are known to cause allergic reactions more seldom
2	Control of hospital-acquired infections	Patients tend to acquire opportunistic infections while they stay in hospital	Revise and improve sanitary and hygiene protocols; implement the requirement that the medical and the cleaning personnel wear paper face masks at all times, and replace them every 150 minutes; provide the necessary supply of rubber gloves
3	Patient falls	Patients who are in a weak condition due to their illnesses, especially elderly patients, often fall out from beds or fall while attempting to visit the sanitary facilities	Provide patients with sensor-enabled wearable RFID technologies (Torres, Ranasinghe, Shi, & Sample, 2013). Require that the medical personnel escorts the patients who are in a weak condition to the sanitary facilities
4	The prevention and management of pressure ulcers	Immobile patients tend to develop pressure ulcers because they remain in the same position in bed over long periods	Create protocols that would oblige the nursing staff to regularly turn over the patients who are under the risk of developing pressure ulcers – at the intervals of 45 minutes during the day and 90 minutes at night. Utilize preventive dressing on patients with an increased risk of developing pressure ulcers (Walsh et al., 2012).
5	Safety of screening procedures	Screening procedures such as radiography create radioactive pollution which adversely affects the health of the patients	Improve the isolation of the rooms in which the radiography procedure is carried out. Purchase the innovative X-ray screening equipment which more precisely targets the area of interest, creating lower amounts of radiation
6	The professionalism of the personnel	New personnel tends to lack experience and training to properly provide the patients with the necessary medical care	Develop protocols which would require the new personnel to work under the supervision of the experienced staff for longer periods

Table 1. The risks identified in the process of risk analysis.

These risks are to be addressed if the quality of service in the given hospital is to be improved.

Recommendations

To deal with the risks identified in the report, it is needed to implement the proposed ways of addressing these risks, which, in turn, requires using additional human and financial resources. Therefore, it is recommended to:

Increase the nurse staffing of the hospitals by 20%;
Provide extra funding for implementing the given recommendations (e.g., for purchasing beds with safety rails, improving the radioactive barriers in radiography rooms, and so on).

It is advised that all the problems are addressed as soon as possible if the patient safety and satisfaction are to be increased, and, therefore, the reputation of the given hospital is to be enhanced.

References

Hospital Authority. (2015). Hospital authority quality and risk management annual report, 2013-2014. Web.

Torres, R. L. S., Ranasinghe, D. C., Shi, Q., & Sample, A. P. (2013). Sensor enabled wearable RFID technology for mitigating the risk of falls near beds. Web.

Walsh, N. S., Blanck, A. W., Smith, L., Cross, M., Andersson, L., & Polito, C. (2012). Use of a sacral silicone border foam dressing as one component of a pressure ulcer prevention program in an intensive care unit setting. Journal of Wound Ostomy & Continence Nursing, 39(2), 146-149. Web.

More related papers Related Essay Examples