Policy Proposal: Quality Patient Safety Act

A policy refers to a condition or a regulation that is set out by an organization or a state to govern the operations of a certain department in the latter places. Policies are vital requirements for organizations as they provide a clear outline to be followed while executing the services by various designated departments. For a country, the existence of a policy provides a sense of direction to the citizens with regards to a particular service or facility. Policies are also an indication that an organization is moving in the right direction as it is a mandatory requirement by the regulatory boards. Medical facilities have adopted a number of policies to help in the offering of medical services to their consumers. The policies adopted by the medical facilities maybe aimed at reducing the medical expenses of the patients, for instance,the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in the United States which was formulated to reduce the medical insurance expenses incurred by the patients; they may also be used regulating the operations of medical institutions (Aiken, 2012). The aim of this paper is to propose a policy that can be used in a medical facility to cover quality patient safety. The medical facilities where the benchmark was carried out involved Gwinnett Medical Center (chosen hospital), other healthcare institutions within the district and the country as a whole.

The initiation of a Quality Patient Safety Act will help in dealing with the various risks to which patients are exposed to while undergoing treatment at a healthcare facility. The main reason why patients remain confident to go to hospitals is because of the belief that their good health condition will be restored to them. It is upon the medical practitioners in the medical institutions to see through that the patients are well taken care of while at the hospital, this takes into consideration the safety of the patient (Mitchell, 2008). There are medical procedures done at healthcare institutions including Gwinnett Medical Center which patients are vulnerable to as far as safety is concernedsuch as surgery, labor and delivery cases, dentistry, x-ray, and optics. Complaints from patients about safety concerns have made the Medical Care Regulatory Board to enforce the enactment of the Quality Patient Safety Act by various hospitals to safeguard the interests of the patients. Without health care providers taking into consideration the safety of their patients, there is a high probability of having an increase in the mortality rate. For instance, in a case where a patient undergoes a surgical procedure, and then later a pair of scissors is mistakenly left inside the organ that was being operated on; there is a high chance that the patient will be left with the pair of scissors inside his/her body for the rest of his/her life which becomes a fatality issue unless operated on to remove the pair of scissors. Ultimately, with the Quality Patient Safety Act, a patient can go forward to reclaim the removal of the pair of scissors from the institution which he/she had surgery.

Medical facilities have to acquire a universal local, state, or federal policy that will help reduce the unsafe operational cases at the various levels which the laws apply. Enforcement on the deployment of highly trained and skilled medical practitioners will help deal with the poorly handled operational procedures during surgeries and other cases that demand proficiency (Stone, Hughes, & Dailey, 2008). To ensure that patients safety concern is kept primal, the government should prioritize on medical practitioners walking with tags having their medical practice number and have a uniform platform for patients to send the various numbers on the tags to determine the authenticity of the doctor or nurse. The state medical body can, therefore, come up with a code which the medical consumers can send short messages for confirmation of a medical practitioners profile. In case an individual is found defective or a quack, they should be thoroughly prosecuted before the court of law for putting peoples lives on danger. Before and after carrying out any operation on a patient, a scanning machine should be provided for detection of any medical equipment that might have been left out inside the body of the patient.

Despite the thorough enforcement required to safeguard the well-being of the patients, it is worth noting that a lot of capital investment will be required to execute the proposed policy. There is a shortage in the number of trained and skilled medical practitioners available for carrying out surgical procedures; this makes it hard for patients to acquire medical services to their demands. The few medical practitioners in the country who are well-trained work at specific hospitals and the amount of money required in the performance of the medical procedures are very expensive for people from the low and middle social and economic status people to acquire; this leaves out only a small number of people presumed as the rich to acquire the services (Carayon, et al., 2014). The corruption and embezzlement levels at the local levels make it hard for enactment of the Quality Patient Safety Act due to lack of sufficient funds in managing the various steps involved before the policy takes its course. Many hospitals lack funds to acquire the equipment required for scanning patients before and after the medical procedures. The existence of poor leadership strategies by the medical regulatory bodies makes it hard for policies to be pushed through.

Therefore, implementation of the Quality Patient Safety Act will ensure that the malpractices which put the safety of patients at risk are curbed. However, a lot of strategies have to be taken into consideration to make the enactment of the policy an easy process. After the implementation of the policy, any factor that may come up as a barrier to its effectiveness should be immediately eliminated. At Gwinnett Medical center, the number of quacks should be reduced and the governing body of the hospital critiqued thoroughly to cater for safety of the patients.

References

Aiken, L. H., Sermeus, W., Van den Heede, K., Sloane, D. M., Busse, R., McKee, M., ... & Tishelman, C. (2012). Patient safety, satisfaction, and quality of hospital care: cross sectional surveys of nurses and patients in 12 countries in Europe and the United States. Bmj, 344, e1717.

Carayon, P., Wetterneck, T. B., Rivera-Rodriguez, A. J., Hundt, A. S., Hoonakker, P., Holden, R., & Gurses, A. P. (2014). Human factors systems approach to healthcare quality and patient safety. Applied ergonomics, 45(1), 14-25.

Mitchell, P. H. (2008). Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Nurses.Defining Patient Safety and Quality care. U.S. National Library of Medicine; Rockville.

Available online at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2681/Stone, P. W., Hughes, R. G., and Dailey, M. (2008). Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Nurses. Creating a Safe and High-Quality Health Care Environment. U.S. National Library of Medicine; Rockville. Available online at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2634/