Even with legions of clinicians and healthcare executives working to improve patient safety, medical errors still cost tens of thousands of lives each year. What more can hospitals do to reduce the number of medication errors, hospital infections and even wrong-site surgeries?
Many institutions are making progress in guarding against medical errors by recruiting medical staff that will make safety their top priority.
Creating a Culture of Patient Safety
Culture is one of the most promising frontiers of patient safety. A safety-oriented culture begins with establishing checks and balances on traditional top-down authority in the medical profession. Behavior-management techniques including training, goal-setting and feedback have been shown to increase clinicians’ use of basic safety procedures such as hand sanitization, often doubling the proportion of workers in compliance, according to one literature review.
Ongoing peer-to-peer training can help ensure that a safety culture permeates a hospital’s workforce. Clinicians can use a simple interpersonal coaching process, similar to how astronauts train—they watch and coach each other.
Employee Engagement Boosts Patient Safety
A successful patient-safety program must encompass both systems and people to avoid more potential medical errors. For example, think of medication dispensation systems where nurses match bar codes on individual doses with patient identification bracelets. If the system doesn’t fit into the workflow of nurses, they may use workarounds, which are likely to increase the chance of errors. Hospitals must work hard to ensure that patient-safety initiatives are relevant to the conditions that bedside clinicians face daily
Hiring to Reduce Medical Errors and Improve Medical Care
Many hospitals have invested in staff whose sole job is to improve patient safety. Retraining can also help many hospital workers join a safety-oriented culture, and so can screening job candidates for their willingness to adapt their work behavior to reduce patient risk.
One last point to ponder: reducing medical errors makes sense financially.
With increased pressure on hospitals to cut costs such as avoidable readmissions of patients, there are now powerful financial incentives for investments in safety ranging from patient-monitoring technologies to training peer clinicians to critique each others’ safety performance. Insurers and the government are demanding transparency on quality metrics, so if you don’t improve care quality, you’re not going to get paid. There’s also an increasing recognition that, in the long run, investments in patient safety pay for themselves.
If you’d like to know more about how to hire the right people to create a safety-conscious culture at your healthcare organization, contact Morgan Hunter HealthSearch today!
About Morgan Hunter HealthSearch
Morgan Hunter HealthSearch (MHHS) provides Executive Search and Interim Leadership solutions for hospitals and health systems throughout the United States. Our services include executive healthcare recruiting, retained healthcare executive search, healthcare interim management, executive placement for hospitals.