Top 10 Common Patient Safety Issues

Hospitals are charged with responsibility of keeping patients wee and safe. Safety and wellness are closely linked as patient safety concerns usually tie directly into patient’s health concerns. Medication errors, diagnostic errors and acquired infections are a few issues that cause health safety concerns.

These patient safety issues and many others will continue to flow in every year. Some of them are long established and will remain in the forefront of providers’ minds for years to come.

Below are 8 patient safety issues you should know:

1.       Medication Errors

According to recent statistics about 1.5 million U.S patients experience adverse effects every year due to medication errors. This issue has incurred healthcare system extra costs of about $3.5 billion when trying to deal with the problem. Recent research suggests that medication errors are largely caused by communication errors between patients and healthcare providers, pharmacists and providers, or patients and pharmacists. In this area of safety issues, health IT is expected to offer a perfect solution.

According to recent study, medication errors have fallen by about 58% after the introduction of electronic reconciliation tools. Some adaptations and innovations such as electronic tools provide a promising future when it comes to cutting down incidences of adverse reactions due to medication errors.

2.       Diagnostic errors

According to a study conducted in 2015, 6 – 17 % of hospital adverse reactions or events and about 10 percent of patient’s death are caused by diagnostic errors. In addition to adverse events they cause patients, diagnostic errors are the most common and the costliest medical malpractices.

Diagnostic errors have been found to be most common in radiology as a result of substandard operating models. As of now, payers, health systems, patients and radiologists have not established best and standard practices that can be used to gauge the quality of radiology services.

What is really needed is a better clinical operating system that will make sure routing of radiology images to the right subspecialty plus an effective practice. With introduction of this, there is a possibility of a significant increase in quality of healthcare and reduced costs that will enable radiologists to perform at their best.

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Diagnostic errors in 2015 were found to be a key issue at NPST’s Patient Safety Awareness. Such errors are more prevalent than many people would realize. Such errors can cause a number of combined issues such as lack of patient engagement and order for appropriate tests.

Diagnostic errors are complex errors that can also be caused by patient missed communications such as failing to make a follow up after a test or patients not realizing the importance of a certain test which can lead to a diagnostic misstep.

3.       Contaminated water

In 2016, many hospitals in the U.S. faced several patient safety challenges due to contaminated water. One of the most prominent issues of contaminated water is the spread of Legionella bacteria which is associated with pneumonia. Statistics tells that 5 patients in the University of Washington contracted the disease with 2 of them dyeing. After subsequent research, Legionella bacteria were detected in two sinks and an ice machine in a cardiac unit in the University of Washington.

In October 2016, STAT investigated the unintended consequences of having many sinks in hospitals. While the sinks were installed to boost better hygiene, their splashing has a potential of dispersing contaminated water droplets that infects nearby patients.

To minimize patient safety issues caused by contaminated water, hospitals should provide sinks that drain water well without splashing.

4.       Data management issues

Data analytics is a concept of transforming large amounts of data in new ways to have a deeper insight. Just like other major institutions, healthcare organizations generate a huge amount of data around employee scheduling, patient loads, and health outcomes. Mining all that data in a proper manner has become one of the major challenges for healthcare institutions. These challenges have led to reduced quality of care and poor patient satisfaction.

5.       Vulnerability of CMD

Cyber insecurity of major personal medical devices has been on the rise since 2011. Healthcare networks carry vulnerable data on specific health knowledge, sensitive financial data and patient history that can be easily hacked into by medical devices connected to the networks.

Some of the devices that have caused patient safety issues include wearable devices that convey patient information to remote providers. With patient safety at risk, providers or healthcare practitioners should establish procedures, training and policies that would ensure hospital data is protected. Safety issues have not arisen only from wearable devices that track biometric information such as respiration and heart rate; other devices such as insulin pumps can also cause insecurity for hospital data.

6.       Acquired Infections

Acquired infections have plagued healthcare facilities both financially and clinically. Protocols such as antimicrobial stewardship and hand hygiene have played a direct role in development rate and transmission of healthcare associated infections. Such protocols have caused patient safety issues according to the CDC. Recent studies show that 1 in every 25 patients will contract acquired infections during their hospital stay. Treating such infections has increased the cost of healthcare up to $9.8 billion per year.

7.       Antibiotic resistance

Current antibiotics prescribing practices, speed in developing resistance by pathogens, and lack of new antibiotics to deal with the issues, have caused patient safety claims. According to CDC, about 2 million people in the U.S. get bacterial infections that are resistant to antibiotics every year. About 23 thousand people die as a result of bacterial infections that are resistant to antibiotics. Antimicrobial stewardship programs may play a key role in promoting antibiotic prescribing practices to help reduce the use of antibiotics and pathogens ability to develop resistance to antibiotic medications.

8.       Health IT

Health information technology has been a curse and a blessing in the patient safety sphere. In general, health IT was meant to enhance processes, aggregate and analyze health data leading to improved health outcomes. However, introduction of health IT has created a good environment for human errors and patient safety issues.

We all know there is a lot of promise for health IT to improve safety and quality care, though new technology seems to bring more problems than solutions at first.