Medical errors do occur in various health care settings, but they can be disastrous in hospitals. There is an urgent need to build a foundation for ensuring patient safety. Most of the methods are simple and common-sense practices. Still, it is necessary to ensure that they remain at the forefront of the hospital staffs’ working habits to ensure patient safety. 

5 Best Practices in Patient Safety:

Curb the Spread of Infection:

Wash and sanitize your hands before you get in direct contact with any patient. Data has suggested that healthcare-related infections are severe yet quite common and affect over 2 million patients every year.

Correctly Identifying Patients: 

Make sure to confirm at least two pieces of information: to ensure that the right patients receive the medicine or treatment meant for them and double-check the appropriate blood type before transfusion.

Avoiding Surgical Errors: 

A ‘universal protocol’ has been developed to prevent wrong-person and wrong-site surgery called ‘time-out.’ In this process, all team members are allotted specific periods to verify an impending clinical action.

Customize Hospital Discharges: 

An easy-to-follow plan must be developed for each patient to include medication routine, a record of the upcoming medical visits, and numbers and names of doctors to call in case of a problem. These steps help reduce readmission by up to 30 percent.

Assembling Rapid Response Teams:

Develop a rapid-response team and encourage everyone on the team to communicate effectively. Team Strategies and Tools for Enhancing Performance (STEPPS) can be tailored to suit the particular health care setting; and used for different purposes from ambulatory clinics to emergency departments.

Patient safety is of the most important to all health care organizations. It performs simultaneously with increasing the quality of best hospital health care services and practicing some best methods for maintaining high patient safety.