Question

Discus the importance of using benchmarking tools and how they promote a culture of safety in healthcare organizations. Examine the importance of effective teams and how they contribute to high-quality care and culture safety in the organization.

Answer 1

Answer:

Importance of Benchmarking tools:

* Focuses on best practices

* Strives for continuous improvement

* Partnering to share information

* Needed to maintain a competitive edge

* Adapting based on customer needs after examination of the best

ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF AN EFFECTIVE SAFETY CULTURE

Conceptual models of organizational safety and empirical studies of organizations widely noted for low levels of errors and accidents (high safety) identify a number of structures and processes essential to effective cultures of safety. Cultures of safety result from the effective interplay of three organizational elements:

(1) environmental structures and processes within the organization

(2) the attitudes and perceptions of workers.

(3) the safety-related behaviors of individuals. Three major environmental structures and processes (i.e., managerial personnel practices, workforce capability, and work design) to patient safety.

The focus here is on the safety management systems and psychological and behavioral readiness and ability of all workers necessary for the creation and maintenance of safety cultures.

Answer

How to contribute high quality care by effective team:

Creating and Sustaining a Culture of Safety:

Employing a nursing workforce strong in numbers and capabilities and designing the work of nursing to prevent errors are critical patient safety defenses.

Regardless of how strong and how well designed such measures may be, however, they will not by themselves fully safeguard patients. The largest and most capable workforce is still fallible, and the best-designed work processes are still designed by fallible individuals. Moreover, as discussed earlier, each introduction of new health care technology brings a host of unanticipated opportunities for errors.

Thus, improving patient safety requires more than relying on the workforce and well-designed work processes; it requires an organizational commitment to vigilance for potential errors and the detection, analysis, and redressing of errors when they occur.

A variety of safety-conscious industries have made such a commitment and achieved lower rates of errors by doing so. These organizations place as high a priority on safety as they do on production; all employees are fully engaged in the process of detecting high-risk situations before an error occurs.

Management is so responsive to employees' detection of risk that it dedicates organizational resources—time, personnel, budget, and training—to bring about needed changes, often recommended by staff, to make work processes safer. Employees also are empowered to act in dangerous situations to reduce the likelihood of adverse events.

The environment is fair and just—appropriately recognizing the relative contributions of individuals and systemic organizational features to errors, supportive of staff, and fosters continuous learning by the organization as a whole and its employees.

These attitudes and employee engagement are so pervasive and observable in the behaviors of such organizations and their employees that an actual culture of safety exists within the organization.