The Joint Commission, Essay Example

According to the Joint Commission, many National Patient Safety Goals have been established in order to serve the best interests of the patients. As a newly appointed hospital CEO, it is my responsibility to ensure that these standards are upheld within my organization. Ultimately, to ensure that this will be the case, I will need to implement specialized training programs to educate my staff about these principles and to determine whether they have the necessary level of education to implement them properly.

Many of the standards proposed by the Joint Commission are already standards of care within my health care organization and it is therefore important to ensure that they are currently being enforced with accuracy. In addition, it would be necessary to introduce new standards to employees and to demonstrate how these will alter their daily practices. For example to “Make improvements to ensure that alarms on medical equipment are heard and responded to on time”, the information technology and health care professional team will need to coordinate so that the accuracy of the alarms on such medical equipment can be affirmed (Joint Commission, 2015).

In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of how the hospital can improve to achieve these new standards, it is necessary to determine the baseline measurements that can be used to determine the current standing of the hospital. This information could include the amount of time that health care professionals spend with each patient on average, hospital expenditures and earnings, the amount of accidents or medical errors, and how patient identification is currently used. Interventions should then be put in place to improve upon currently existing information and improvements will be measured over time.

Different interventions can be proposed to solve different problems. For example, to ensure that the hospital can get “important test results to the right staff person on time”, it is necessary to implement or optimize the electronic health record system in addition to providing staff with relevant training in order to ensure that such information can instantaneously be received in the correct location. Furthermore, the life preservation rate could be improved and legal problems can be avoided by determining which “patients are most likely to try to commit suicide”. While this problem does not occur very frequently, the information on patients’ health records will allow the health care team to gain a greater understanding of the individuals who are at risk for depression or suicide so that these patients could be provided with the help that they need.

To ensure all of these standards are implemented effectively, a series of different interventions need to be created to address each change. However, it is expected that over time, the hospital will be able to easily adapt to these changes. Furthermore, it is expected that these interventions would be effective in health care institutions across the board, so different institutions could learn from one another with regards to the effectiveness that each of these interventions will employ.

References

Joint Commission. (2015). Hospital National Patient Safety Goals. Retrieved from http://www.jointcommission.org/assets/1/6/2015_HAP_NPSG_ER.pdf