Patient-Centered Care - a focus on safety and quality that has earned Backus national recognition.
Caregiver's View
Jo Friese, RN, Clinical |
Patient safety has always been part of the culture at Backus Hospital. Our commitment grew even stronger in 2006.
In September,we launched a new safety protocol to enhance patient safety in an area that typically is a problem nationwide — medication errors. Nationwide,medication errors injure 1.5 million people annually. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 41 percent of all fatal errors involve giving an improper dose, 16 percent giving the wrong drug and 16 percent using the wrong route of delivery.
Our new medication reconciliation process — which includes a review of patients'medications at the time of admission,during transfers to various patient floors in the hospital and at discharge — allows us to more efficiently analyze patients'medications that they take at home with new medications prescribed in the hospital. Our physicians, nurses,pharmacists, unit coordinators and patients are all benefiting from this.
A newly revised medication reconciliation sheet is crucial to this effort. Medications are printed each night and the physician can reconcile them by continuing or discontinuing the medications right on the form. The forms can then be used as a daily tool to assist physicians with medication management.
The sheet provides a list of current inpatient medications,medications taken by the patient prior to arrival, and check-off boxes for continuation, discontinuation or change in order. The sheet is completed within 24 hours of admission and signed by a physician. It can be printed on demand in all transfer situations in which a rewrite of orders is required, such as after surgery or transfer from a Critical Care Unit bed to a floor bed.
The form results in fewer rewritten orders and data entry points, decreasing the possibility of bad handwriting or an incorrect key stroke impacting patient safety.
Medication reconciliation was not the only area of focus for patient safety. We continued to develop, enhance and utilize a number of important protocols.
We remain dedicated to the "five rights"— right patient, right medication, right dose, right route and right time. We have a number of checks and balances in place, and we realize how important these seemingly routine checks can be.
In the past year,we have bolstered our efforts to take "time outs"before surgery; use two patient identifiers prior to any test procedure or medication administration; better communicate among various caregivers on multiple shifts in an increasingly complex healthcare environment; eliminated dangerous drug abbreviations; improved protocols involving "look alike"or "sound alike"drugs; upgraded our fall prevention efforts; participated in the National Institute of Health's 100,000 Lives program, which includes our Rapid Response Team, which can be called on at any time if a patient's condition takes a sudden turn for the worse; and continued to emphasize the importance of hand hygiene for infection control.
All of these efforts are the result of focusing on the needs of our patients, because we know this attention to detail results in a safe, high quality hospital — and the best patient experience.