Best Practices and Tips for Good Patient Care

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When providing patient care, it is imperative to be sure that the healthcare team is all on the same page. The patient’s records must be up to date and recorded with accuracy and in a timely manner. Healthcare professionals have to deliver safe, high quality healthcare to all patients at all times. The medical field is not an exact science and never will be because technology is ever changing and research and development is evolving all the time. Keeping up to date with records is crucial for the patient and healthcare organizations.

There are policies, procedures and protocols in all organizations that must be followed for legal reasons, but also for safety and record keeping. This protects the employer, employees and their consumers. Mistakes are going to be made no matter who the employer is. Humans are not perfect and machines do break. In the healthcare industry, making mistakes can cause many problems and could even be fatal. This is why following protocol matters.

Best Patient Care Tips

According to the AHRQ or Agency of Healthcare Research and Quality, there are many practices and tips for the best patient care that need to be followed to ensure safe, accurate practices that will reduce risks. Their goal is to deliver safe, high quality healthcare to all patients in all clinical settings at all times. The National Quality forum and 260 of the leading healthcare providers, purchasers and consumer organizations endorse and strongly encourage that the practices listed are adopted by all healthcare professionals to reduce all risks.

They state that the healthcare industry needs to create a culture of safety, which encourages and supports the reporting of any situation to ensure safer and better healthcare. Patients should be clearly informed of all risks, outcomes and healthcare professionals should also be in accordance with the patient’s stated preferences.

Explicit protocols and procedures are to be used at all times. Adequate levels of experience, training and healthcare professionals need to be on staff to be able to provide needed patient care. Physicians who are certified, and had training within the same field will manage all staff in special care units. Pharmacists should actively be involved in medication orders, preparation of medications, as well as dispensing, administering and monitoring all medications. Verbal orders should be recorded and repeated back to ensure accuracy. Use of only standardized abbreviations should be used. Patient care summaries and other records should be recorded and not entered from memory.

Malpractice Issues

Medical malpractice happens somewhere to someone everyday. It is something that has crossed every patient’s mind at one time or another, and is a legitimate fear for nurses and doctors. People’s lives can be changed forever due to a mistake that should not have happened in the first place. It is inevitable that mistakes do happen, but following protocol can reduce these instances significantly. This is why it is so important for the healthcare industry to come up with plans to stop these mistakes from happening. Ensuring that the entire healthcare team is clear of all instructions, and on the same page, will reduced risks in patient care, and to the staff providing the best patient care.