Improving Health Care Quality & Patient Safety in an Acute Care Essay

Improving Health Care Quality & Patient Safety in an Acute Care Setting - Essay Example , traditionally dealt with through focus on mistakes from individuals, are now accepted to result, not from human error alone, but also from failure of systems. For this reason, it is important to maintain safety and quality of healthcare in acute settings. Preventable adverse effects, in particular, are believed to be because of systemic and latent failures in care-delivery systems. The key to ensuring safety and quality in acute healthcare settings is using defense mechanisms, which can identify and interrupt situations that could be dangerous (Healy, 2009). One example of this in an acute clinical setting is the systematic surveillance of patients by nurses that may serve, as a defense mechanism to stop dangerous situations, as well as strategies for error recovery. There are several key challenges that face quality and patient safety in acute settings. Systemic factors like underuse of technology in existence, failure to include family and patient in making decisions, poor collaboration from healthcare members, inadequate resources, and poor staffing is one of them. Another challenge has to do, with human factors like the skills and education of nurses, to implement quality and safety strategies (Healy, 2009). Novice nurses, especially, are overwhelmed by time and task constraints, which prevent them from integrating the â€Å"big picture† that effective improvement of quality and patient safety in acute care settings requires. Resources like data access and time are vital in the performance of comprehensive assessments. Healthcare workers who are interrupted, distracted, or responsible for functions that are not related to nursing will not have enough time to devote to this improvement. Collaboration, which is essential to this improve ment, especially with patients and their families, has influence on acute patients’ outcomes (Healy, 2009). Policies or unit structures that are not conducive to this collaboration impedes on the process, as well as adversely