Patient Safety: Case of FALLS


Accreditation is a voluntary, self-regulatory process required by governmental entity, must be embedded into the system and must be considered all along the implementation process. (Hunt, Sproat and Kitzmiller, 2004). Accreditation also aids in the additional improvement of the establishments or programs as associated to resources put in, course of action followed, and results attained. A certifying organization weighs up and judges establishments to bear witness to the institution’s achievements.


Regulation and accreditation agencies

The nursing regulations embarked on as a simple registry procedure to protect, in equal capacity, both the nurses and the public from harm. Regulatory agencies are allowed to generate and put into effect rules or regulations that bear the full force of the law. Normalization agencies and certification bodies have formed part of the nursing fraternity for years. Accreditation certifies that a given health organization meets a set of standards.


The JCAHO (Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations) accreditation is the most famous accreditation sought by a hospital or healthcare institution and it’s supposed to address the organization’s level of performance in areas like patient rights, patient treatments, and control (Cherry and Jacob, 2005). The primary voluntary accrediting organizations, National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) ensures managed care organizations, including outpatient clinic and medical practice group settings (Cherry and Jacob, 2005).


Currently, the protection of the public still is the principal purpose of normalization. In addition, outlining nursing education as well as nursing practices is incorporated through the use of certification which implies that an individual has met specific standards of educational and clinical practices (Hunt, Sproat and Kitzmiller, 2004).


Regulation and accreditation standards

Regulation agencies are accountable to the public they supply and execute strategies under tremendous inspection by the media. In response to increased prominence on patient safety, JCAHO set up Sentinel Event Standard which needed organizations to carry out selected steps to fully understand the factors and systems associated with adverse patient events after confirming certain defining tasks. According to Cherry and Jacob (2005), the steps revolve around a root cause analysis intended to understand the system at fault so that improvements can be determined and implemented to prevent future occurrences.


Strategies to fulfill the standards

The nurses’ role in improving the patients’ safety and reducing errors took several steps. First, nurses needed to educate patients and their family members about prescriptions and express regret to those affected where needed. Secondly, nurses had to contribute in upgrading strategies including the root cause analysis strategy


In addition, nurses would implement mechanisms in the company of primary care providers to guarantee follow-up, notably putting on view critical information for each patient to smooth the progress of follow up, seeking curative or counteractive care immediately when defensible,To some extent, these rules aren’t effective because some of the nurses may practice them, just to support an impression hence actualize the problem and also set a baseline against which to measure improvement methods. Why I believe this is not effective is because there will be human errors in the data collected and hence no good job.


Reference

Cherry Barbara and Jacob Susan, (2005). Contemporary Nursing: issues, trends, and Management. Elsevier Mosby. Missouri.

Hunt E. C., Sproat, I. and Kitzmiller, R. R., (2004).The nursing informatics implementation guide. Springer, Verlag. New York: NY.