Question

n this discussion, emphasis is on awareness of client quality and safety and in particular what is a "culture of safety."

Based on the review of the following websites at the Institute of Healthcare Improvement and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality answer the following questions.

1. What values ensure a culture of safety?
2. How can healthcare facilities establish a culture of safety?
3. What is the nurse's role in maintaining a culture of safety?

Answer 1

Throughout 2016, ANA committed to raising awareness of the importance of a 'Culture of Safety.' By focusing on a different theme each month, we explored the benefits of a collaborative commitment to safety, and how to achieve it.

When safety is given prime importance, everything else begins to fall into place. Yet without an awareness of safety within organizations, any other ambitions are pointless. That’s because without proper support of everyone’s health and wellness, it’s impossible to maintain the very best care long-term.

A 'culture of safety' describes the core values and behaviors that come about when there is a collective and continuous commitment by organizational leadership, managers and health care workers to emphasize safety over competing goals

ANA’s main aim was to support patient safety and the health and wellness of nurses. During 2016, ANA explored a number of topics relating to a ‘culture of safety’, ranging from fatigue and shiftwork; to culture congruence and leadership.

Through regular webinars with expert speakers, and a wealth of downloadable resources on emerging safety issues, ANA developed a library that can be accessed by nurses seeking support on a wide scope of issues related to patient safety. These range from encouraging nurse leadership in matters of organizational safety, to personal nurse health, to matters of patient protection.

Answer 2 values ensure a culture of safety?

One of the key values is to be a person of action instead of blaming others or ignoring safety problems be a leader be the one to correct the safety issue. If this safety issue is one that you cannot fix yourself report it to someone who can take the proper action to having the issue corrected. Another would be teamwork and communication. Communication is key in so many areas of life, from your career to your personal life. Communication is a golden value in life.Answer 3

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.

Answer 4- Nurses' vigilance at the bedside is essential to their ability to ensure patient safety. It is logical, therefore, that assigning increasing numbers of patients eventually compromises nurses' ability to provide safe care. Several seminal studies have demonstrated the link between nurse staffing ratios and patient safety, documenting an increased risk of patient safety events, morbidity, and even mortality as the number of patients per nurse increases. The strength of these data has led several states, beginning with California in 2004, to establish legislatively mandated minimum nurse-to-patient ratios; in California, acute medical–surgical inpatient units may assign no more than five patients to each registered nurse.

The nurse-to-patient ratio is only one aspect of the relationship between nursing workload and patient safety. Overall nursing workload is likely linked to patient outcomes as well. A sophisticated 2011 study showed that increased patient turnover was also associated with increased mortality risk, even when overall nurse staffing was considered adequate. Determining adequate nurse staffing is a very complex process that changes on a shift-by-shift basis, and requires close coordination between management and nursing based on patient acuity and turnover, availability of support staff and skill mix, and many other factors. The process of establishing nurse staffing on a unit-by-unit and shift-by-shift basis is discussed in detail in an AHRQ WebM&