Nurse Patient Safety

Nurses play a central role in direct patient care and safety surveillance at the point of care. This role suggests a need for consensus on a core set of measures that can be used to monitor safe practices and guide resource allocation decisions that affect patient outcomes in a health system.Nurse Patient Safety Example Paper

This work will review factors affecting patient safety in ICU and what to do to reach a proper patient outcome.

The ICU

Patients in Intensive Care Units are at risk of unsafe care because of the complex environment, also a patient may sustain an injury as a direct result of daily care. This makes nurses uniquely poised to have a tremendous impact on patient safety as professional caregivers in direct contact with patients and their families. Quality care and patient safety require a focused commitment from all level of an organization, yet nurses serve as the bedside safety advocate with the opportunity to put theory into practice. The challenges are: What is the right thing to do? Is the right thing being done? Is it being done right?

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Factors that play a role in patient safety in ICU environment

The critical care setting is one of the most complex environments in a health care facility. Critical care units must manage the intersecting challenges of maintaining a high-tech environment and ensuring staff competency in operating the equipments, providing high-quality care to the sickest patients of a health facility and attending to the needs of staff members working in a very stressful environment (Chang et al, 2005).Nurse Patient Safety Example Paper

Before building initiatives to enhance patient safety, the extent of patient injuries and events in ICUs must be well explained. Critically ill patients are at high risk for complications due to the severity of their medical conditions, the complex and invasive nature if intensive care treatments and procedures and the use of drugs and technology that carry risks as well as benefits (Chang et al, 2005).

What to do?

The first step of patient safety improvement process is to gain the support and engaging leadership.Risk managers, patient safety officers and critical care physicians start working together to make a business case to executives for patient safety investments. In short; implementing ICU patient safety plane becomes a team effort (Rainey and Combs, 2003).

An improvement initiative will be more successful if a culture of patient safety prevails. This should create an ICU environment in which all members of ICU team understand how to exchange patient information in a meaningful and respectful way. A starting point in creating such a culture is to conduct an assessment of the current climate in the ICU whether and how it affects patient care (Rainey and Combs, 2003).

A facility’s approach to provide safe critical care services will depend mainly on the ICU is organized, staffed and designed i.e. ICU staffing, structure and work environment. Generally, there are three organizational models for ICUs; the open model which allows different members of the medical staff to mange patients in the ICU. The closed model is limited to ICU certified physicians managing all cases. The hybrid model, it combines aspects of the previous two models on referral basis (Chang et al 2005, Rainey and Combs 2003 and Pronovost et al 2003).