Patient Safety and Quality

According to the Institute of Medicine, USA, patient safety is part of the discipline of Quality. In general all world talk about Quality and Patient Safety and in many cases of Quality Assurance, as a whole, involving both disciplines.

As per our education and culture we have incorporated assurances such as the following: We are the result of our dedication and effort. We are the product of our desire to be and do things. Good people get the best results and do not make mistakes. We cannot fail. We have free will and we do it our way.

YES, there are organizations that work with zero error. Or at least, do not consider an option, to have a single error (although sometimes it happens). These are called High Reliability Organizations (HRO).

Currently the subject of medication error is bringing very serious disorders and expressing concerns as to the responsibility to provide a safe environment with quality in nursing care.

Defining processes and standardizing procedures is an objective to be achieved within the activities of the hospital and the hospital pharmacy. We know that a high percentage of Adverse Events comes from a communication failure.

Implementing a change is a great effort, whether it is a personal matter, or within a group or institution.

Adverse Event is an Error with Damage. It is important to have a clear definition of Adverse Events (AE) because there are many variants of it in literature.

Unitarizing (Unit dose repackaging) is the process of preparing the drugs in ready-to-administer form to the patient. That is, without any necessary preparation to be performed in a subsequent operation. This process is normally performed in the Hospital Pharmacy, Drug Store Sector or Unitarization Center…

What do we understand when we talk about culture in a hospitable environment?

We refer to the attitude of each one and in its totality towards the others and toward the environment.

We have reviewed more than 100 articles and works and all of them show error statistics. Even so, it is very difficult to reach firm numbers. For those of us who are used to the engineering sciences, it is difficult to understand so many differences between some works and others.