Patient safety is about how healthcare organizations protect their patients from errors. While many hospitals are good at keeping their patients safe, some hospitals aren’t. It’s up to everyone to make sure that patient safety is a priority.
The difference between pt. safety and quality
Safety has to do with lack of harm. Quality has to do with efficient, effective, purposeful care that gets the job done at the right time.
Safety focuses on avoiding bad events. Quality focuses on doing things well.
Safety makes mistakes less likely to happen. Quality raises the ceiling so the overall care experience is a better one.
Errors
Error is defined as “an act of commission (doing something wrong) or omission (failing to do the right thing) leading to an undesirable outcome or significant potential for such an outcome.
Many errors do not result in adverse events , we generally defined them as “near misses” or “close calls.”
Some errors involve care that falls below a professional standard of care, these are called negligence .
Finally, although most preventable adverse events involve errors, not all of them do.
Adverse Events
Because patients commonly experience adverse outcomes, it is important to distinguish adverse outcomes as a result of medical care from morbidity and mortality that patients suffer as a consequence of their underlying medical conditions.
The former are known as adverse events and has been defined by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement as follows:
Unintended physical injury resulting from medical care that requires additional monitoring, treatment, or hospitalization, or that results in death.
Adverse events may be preventable or non-preventable like harm from their medical care in the absence of any errors (i.e., from accepted complications or medication side effects).
Source:
- www.IHI.org.
- https://psnetahrq.goviglossary/e.
- Understanding Patient Safety, Robert M. Wachter & Kiran Gupta
Dr. Khalid Abulmajd
Healthcare Quality Consultant