Consider the hospital-acquired conditions that are not reimbursed for under Medicare/Medicaid. Among these conditions are specific safety issues such as infections, falls, medication errors, and other safety concerns that could have been prevented or alleviated with the use of evidence-based guidelines. Hospital Safety Score, an independent nonprofit organization, uses national performance measures to determine the safety score for hospitals in the United States. The Hospital Safety Score Web site and other online resources provide hospital safety scores to the public.
Read the scenario below:
Scenario
As the manager of a unit, you have been advised by the patient safety office of an alarming increase in the hospital safety score for your unit. This is a very serious public relations matter because patient safety data is public information. It is also a financial crisis because the organization stands to lose a significant amount of reimbursement money from Medicare and Medicaid unless the source of the problem can be identified and corrected. You are required to submit a safety score improvement plan to the organization’s leadership and the patient safety office.
Select a specific patient safety goal that has been identified by an organization, or one that is widely regarded in the nursing profession as relevant to quality patient care delivery, such as patient falls, infection rates, catheter-induced urinary infections, IV infections, et cetera.
Develop a 3–5 page safety score improvement plan.
Organize your report with these headings:
Write a 3–5 page safety score improvement plan for mitigating concerns, addressing a specific patient-safety goal that is relevant to quality patient care. Determine what a best evidence-based practice is and design a plan for resolving issues resulting from not maintaining patient safety.Quality improvement and patient safety are health care industry imperatives (Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Quality of Health Care in America, 2001). Effective quality improvement results in system and organizational change. This ultimately contributes to the creation of a patient safety culture
Context
Internet Resources
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