Introduction
Patient safety and quality care issue affects many healthcare setting and manifests themselves through wrong medicine prescription, long waiting appointment times, and wrong medical calculations. Quality of care is how well healthcare offerings for patients and populations enhance health-related outcomes and maintain current technical competence. This paper provides some of the best practices related to patient well-being and care effectiveness, financial implications to hospitals that fail to address the issue, and offers a project implementation using the IHI PDSA Model. Additionally, the essay provides quality improvement (QI) measures for the project suggested, utilizes the Pareto chart as a QI tool, and offers a leadership style to execute the project.
Best Practices or Recommendations
Typically, hospitals are concerned about the prevalence of potential complications and the severity of patient harm in terms of insurance payments and litigation expenses. Actions to enhance patient safety have demonstrated vastly differing degrees of efficacy. The following are some of the best practices and recommendations for improving client well-being and effectiveness of care by medical institutions. Firstly, improving patient access to health-related information and practitioner annotations is an excellent way to prevent medical record inaccuracies (Ricciardi, 2021). When patients access their Electronic Health Records (EHR) documentation, they can identify medication background inconsistencies and prescription problems.
Secondly, ensuring facility hygiene is a straightforward method for avoiding patient safety incidents. To safeguard patients from hospital-acquired illnesses, institution personnel should ensure that all healthcare or workplace environments are clean. Thirdly, there is more to creating pleasant patient outcomes than merely making the customer delighted (Ricciardi, 2021). Patient satisfaction is equally dependent on promoting patient safety and preventing avoidable injuries. A recommended guideline is that healthcare settings must have a straightforward treatment scheduling system to ensure that patients receive appropriate medical care. Patients unable to receive critical care may become sicker while awaiting an appointment (Ricciardi, 2021). Healthcare companies must develop a process for appointment booking that minimizes consultation wait times.
Financial Impact on the Organization and Patient
There are various approaches in which client wellness and effectiveness care-related inefficiencies can affect the income stream of a hospital setting. First, patient safety failures can immediately impact compensation under value-based monetization strategies. Commercial and state payers increasingly connect reimbursement to the attainment of quality goals (Vaismoradi et al., 2020). These standards or benchmarks necessitate the provider institution and, by implication, individual providers to accomplish healthcare quality goals, such as fewer falls. Secondly, patient safety failures can result in financial losses for organizations under capitated payment plans (Vaismoradi et al., 2020). Thus, patient medical inaccuracies may cause the overall care expense to surpass the set amount the entity would get. These missteps lead to hospital-acquired illnesses that disproportionately elevate the cost of care.
Thirdly, reputational damage might prompt individuals to seek treatment elsewhere, a phenomenon known as client permeability that directly impacts volume and income. Patients becoming more conscious of publicly posted effectiveness ratings and performance statistics will likely choose their providers with greater care (Vaismoradi et al., 2020). A single medical safety misstep can destroy an organization’s image, and it might take years to regain society’s trust.
Finally, suits such as incompetent accreditation and wrong-site operation, brought by individuals, their relatives, and even physicians and personnel, might incur legal fees for treatment and processing (Vaismoradi et al., 2020). Even occurrences that do not eventually lead to patient damage might contribute to revenue loss if they are poorly managed. For the patients, medication errors can cause severe or chronic conditions such as irritation, rashes, and skin deformity, resulting in the use of more funds to manage the new ailments.
Project Implementation Using IHI PDSA Model
The project to be implemented would be patient feedback that addresses delayed appointment schedules among patients within the institution. Patient feedback can aid in increasing client retention and decreasing customer loss. The opinion of clients will provide significant insight into what patients and service consumers think of the provided medical services. Assessing patient comments will offer a great understanding of what functions well within the organization and requires further development in care delivery. The Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) workbook is a valuable instrument for recording a transformation assessment (Barker et al., 2018).
The PDSA cycle is an acronym for evaluating a modification by formulating a strategy to examine the alteration (Plan), conducting the experiment (Do), watching and understanding from the results (Study), and identifying what adjustments to the trial should be implemented (Act).
PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act) Worksheet
- Tool: Patient Feedback.
- Step: Distribution of Surveys.
- Cycle: First Try.
Plan
I intend to try a method for distributing satisfaction questionnaires and receiving them back.
I hope this will result in a minimum of 30 returned questionnaires per week during the program.
Steps to execute:
- I will post the questionnaires at the cash register.
- The cashier will motivate the patient to complete a survey and place it in the container adjacent to the other questionnaires.
- The company will test this for one week.
Do
What I observed:
- I observed that patients frequently had other responsibilities, such as booking an appointment or billing for services and did not feel capable of completing another activity.
- Occasionally, the registration area can become crowded and backed up.
- The checkout clerk frequently asked patients whether they would want to complete a survey.
Study
Lesson learned
- We only received 12 completed questionnaires by the end of the week; hence, this approach was ineffective.
Act
Conclusions from the cycle
- Patients did not wish to stay after their appointment to complete the survey. As such, patients must be able to complete the survey at their convenience.
- We will persuade them to complete the survey at home and provide a postage-paid envelope for their return.
Quality Improvement (QI) Measures
Patient feedback can help increase client retention and decrease client loss. Clients’ feedback will significantly illuminate patients’ and service customers’ perceptions of the medical services given. Consequently, analyzing patient feedback will provide a profound knowledge of what is performed properly within the institution and what needs further improvement regarding healthcare provision. When hospital administrators establish organizational objectives, such as eliminating patient falls or lowering consultation wait times, they employ a method known as quality improvement.
The quality enhancement initiatives to monitor the effectiveness improvement of patient feedback would improve care coordination among the organization’s departments (Swanwick & Vaux, 2020). Care coordination entails organizing patient-care functions and communicating information across all parties involved in a person’s well-being to provide safer, more appropriate treatment (Peterson et al., 2019). Through the measure, appointment schedules wait time by patients would be reduced within the organizations as they would not have to wait for a specific practitioner since they will be available within the departments.
Quality Improvement Tool
Quality improvement instruments are tactics or procedures that can aid in the comprehension, analysis, and communication of a person’s QI efforts. A Pareto chart will be utilized to analyze and monitor the institution’s patient safety and quality care. Pareto analysis is a strategy used for commercial decision-making, but it has applications in a broad range of sectors, from behavioral finance to quality assurance, and is mostly founded on the 80/20 rule (Ali & Johl, 2022). As an approach to making decisions, the Pareto principle is the most appropriate tool in this scenario as it quantitatively differentiates a small number of input components that have the most influence on the output. Figures 1 and 2 charts were drawn after a sample of 430 questionnaires issued to patients were collected and assessed.
Leadership Style
In implementing my project, I would utilize a democratic or participatory leadership style, a concept under behavioral management theories. Democratic leadership is largely concerned with interpersonal interactions and cooperation, exercised by executives who acquire the trust and admiration of others with relative ease. In addition, it fosters open and reciprocating collaboration among workers, fostering a sense of unity and shared effort. As such, in obtaining patient feedback, cooperating with them would enable them to share pertinent information related to waiting times for consultations with practitioners. As a result, it will provide a foundation to act on the issue and offer solutions to improve their safety and the quality of care received.
Conclusion
In conclusion, patient safety and quality of care are critical health issues that need hospital intervention to avoid ineffective care delivery. Enhancing patient access to health-related data and clinician comments is an effective method for preventing medical record inaccuracies. However, under capitated payment models, patient wellness breaches can cause financial consequences for companies. Through coordinated care, institutions would be better equipped to tackle patient safety and quality care concerns to provide care services effectively. The participatory leadership approach would enable patients to contribute essential information regarding appointment wait times when receiving patient feedback. As a result, it will give a basis for addressing the issue and proposing solutions to enhance the safety and quality of the treatment they get.
References
Ali, K., & Johl, S. K. (2022). Critical success factors of total quality management practices using Pareto analysis. International Journal of Productivity and Quality Management, 36(3), 353-381. Web.
Barker, T. S., Smith, C. A., Waguespack, G. M., Mercante, D. E., & Gunaldo, T. P. (2018). Collaborative skill building in dentistry and dental hygiene through interprofessional education: Application of a quality improvement model. American Dental Hygienists’ Association, 92(5), 14-21. Web.
Peterson, K., Anderson, J., Bourne, D., Charns, M. P., Gorin, S. S., Hynes, D. M., McDonald MM. K. M., Singer, S. J., & Yano, E. M. (2019). Health care coordination theoretical frameworks: a systematic scoping review to increase their understanding and use in practice. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 34(1), 90-98. Web.
Ricciardi, W., Cascini, F. (2021). Guidelines and safety practices for improving patient safety. In Textbook of Patient Safety and Clinical Risk Management (pp.156- 362), Springer.
Swanwick, T., & Vaux, E. (Eds.). (2020). ABC of quality improvement in healthcare. John Wiley & Sons.
Vaismoradi, M., Tella, S., A. Logan, P., Khakurel, J., & Vizcaya-Moreno, F. (2020). Nurses’ adherence to patient safety principles: A systematic review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(6), 1-15. Web.
