Health Care Discussion, Essay Example

Demands for improved vigilance by health care practitioners is not a suitable means to reduce error for several reasons. Primarily, the request is unstructured and vague, leaving professionals with no guidelines to follow. Additionally, being “more careful” shifts the focus away from the acquisition of information and habits that would reduce the likelihood of these errors, and instead suggests that providers need only to be more aware. Even if the issue were purely behavioral in nature, psychological principles of learning show that changing behaviors is more than a simple choice, and instead requires repetition and time to form new associations.

In a 2011 article about medical error, Schiff promotes the emerging importance of reliability science in medical practice. The author points out that the current atmosphere surrounding error management and reporting is that of blame. This environment does not promote the improvement of quality and may reduce potential gains in the regularity of error reporting. There are several suggested measures that could serve as sorely needed guidelines for the reduction of all types of error in medical services, rather than relying on the ambiguous request for vigilance. Examples include extra attention to information exchanges with team members, anticipating problems, taking timely action, using evidently reliable technology, and employing cautious redundancy of methods. While many of Schiff’s suggestions may seem obvious, it is also apparent that professionals are not currently using them to their advantage in the error management process. The reduction of errors in the health care system is a necessity to maximize the probability of positive patient outcomes (Woodward et al., 2011). Current measures to achieve error reduction are virtually nonexistent, leaving the entire endeavor to be based on an unstructured type of honors system. Simple requests for improvement will do nothing to help without a tangible and testable approach.

References

Schiff, G. D. (2011). Medical Error. JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association,305(18), 1890.

Woodward, H. I., Mytton, O. T., Lemer, C., Yardley, I. E., Ellis, B. M., Rutter, P. D., … & Wu,W. (2010). What have we learned about interventions to reduce medical errors?.

Annual Review of Public Health, 31, 479-497.