Question

What are the current patient safety characteristics of your organizational culture? Identify an aspect of your culture that needs to be changed with regard to patient safety, and suggest strategies for change.

Answer 1

Patient safety measures helps to minimise harm to patient, reduce healthcare related errors and risks. This helps to improve the quality of patient care and helps achieve positive outcomes. Patient safety culture is the attitudes, behaviours and patterns that help an organization to prevent any kind of harm to patient and ensure proper client safety.
Some of the safety culture characteristics of my organization are as follows :

1. Effective and clear line of communication between doctors, nurses, paramedics and patient which helps in easy communication about patient safety related instructions and measures.
2. Doing team work which helps in easy resolution of patient safety related issues.
3. Well educated and trained staff that helps to limit errors and adverse effects. Well skilled, trained and educated staff perform the care giving services in a more organized way that helps in preventing patient harm.
4. Regular teachings about the importance and benefits of patient safety and trainings about appropriate measures and steps help to build a patient friendly environment that omits errors and adverse effects.
5. Timely evaluation of healthcare delivery practices and organization design helps to improve the patient care and avoid any mishaps.

According to me the aspect of my culture that needs to be changed regarding patient safety is staff learning and teaching programmes. I feel that the learning programmes for patient safety are not very effective. The concerned authorities should curate the programmes according to patient needs. These should be interesting so that learners do not loose their interest midway. Trainings through demonstrations, mock drills, easy to learn charts and posters will help in better learning.