Hazards patient safety

Respirator parts Moist heat (autoclave) Moist heat (low- temperature steam, or hot water at 80°C) Sterilization Disinfection Sterilization by steam where possible Chemicals not recommended may be microbiplogically ineffective, may present hazard to patient safety by compromising the safety devices on the machine... 

Moist heat (low Disinfection heat where possible microbiologically ineffective, may present hazard to patient safety by... 

FDA Patient Safety News. Potentially hazardous interaction between Avinza and alcohol (issued March 2006). Available at htty //www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/ psn/printer.cfm id=412 (accessed 15/08/07). 

HIT can enhance patient safety in three ways it can help prevent medical errors and adverse events it can initiate rapid responses to any event and it can enable the tracking of events, if they occur, and provide feedback on them to learn from [30]. But it is the first of these which is of most interest when it comes to proactively reducing the risk of harm. If we can identify the conditions in which dangerous scenarios occur we have a vital window of opportunity to intervene in the natural history of a hazard (see Sect. 2.6). 

The basis for the national or international standards (lEC, UL, VDE, MDD [the European Medical Device Directive]) is to reduce file risk of hazardous currents reaching the patient under normal conditions. Even under a single fault condition, patient safety shall be secured. 

This definition goes some way to differentiate patient safety from more general concerns about the quality of healthcare the focus is on the dark side of quality (Vincent, 1997), care that is actually harmful rather than just not of a good standard. Healthcare is, in many cases at least, inherently hazardous and the definition implicitly acknowledges this. The definition also refers to the amelioration of adverse outcomes or injuries, which broadens the definition beyond traditional safety concerns towards an area that would, in many industries, be called disaster management. In healthcare, amelioration firstly refers to the need for rapid medical intervention to deal with the immediate crisis, but also to the need to care for injured patients and to support the staff involved. 

The Hopkins team assumed from the outset that safety interventions could only take root if the front line staff were aware of the hazards patients faced and a need for change. A positive safety culture was regarded as essential, by no means sufficient to produce change but a necessary foundation. The safety critical attitudes, beliefs and behaviours need to be embedded at all levels of the organization, so that as far as possible everyone begins with a shared set of assumptions. 

The nature of the book, xi Inspiration, acknowledgements and thanks, xiii SECTION ONE The Evolution of Patient Safety Chapter 1 Medical harm a brief history, 3 Chapter 2 The emergence of patient safety, 14 Chapter 3 Integrating safety and quality, 31 SECTION TWO The Hazards of Healthcare Chapter 4 The nature and scale of error and harm, 49 Chapter 5 Reporting and learning systems, 75 Chapter 6 Measuring safety, 96... 

Battles, J.R. and Lifford, R.J. 2003. Organizing patient safety research to identify risks and hazards. Quality Safety Health Care, 12(11), ii2-ii7. 

Battles, J. B., Lilford, R. J., Organizing Patient Safety Research to Identify Risks and Hazards, Quality and Safety in Health Care, Vol. 12, 2003, pp. ii2-ii7. 

Component 2. Calls for healfh care organizations to systematically identify and mitigate patient safety-related hazards and risks with an effective integrated mechanism, in order to continuously reduce preventable patient-related harms. 

Fagerhaugh, S. Y, Hazards in Hospital Care Ensuring Patient Safety, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 1987. 

Chapter 3 presents introductory aspects of safety and human factors. Chapter 4 is devoted to methods considered useful to perform patient safety analysis. These methods include failure modes and effect analysis (FMEA), fault tree analysis (FTA), root cause analysis (RCA), hazard and operability analysis (HAZOP), six sigma methodology, preliminary hazard analysis (PFfA), interface safety analysis (ISA), and job safety analysis (JSA). Patient safety basics are presented in Chapter 5. This chapter covers such topics as patient safety goals, causes of patient injuries, patient safety culture, factors contributing to pahent safety culture, safe practices for better health care, and patient safety indicators and their selection. 

There are two parts to this. One is the epidemiologic error studies that have dominated the medical literature. The second part describes the early organized efforts in patient safety. Researchers and theorists in the safety field have moved beyond a limited conceptualization of safety that focuses solely on counting errors. It is now understood that a focus on hazard and harm is more meaningful. This focus will be introduced in Chapter Three. 

In the case of hazards in the environment of care, the safety officer shall be immediately notified and shall respond. In the absence of the safety officer, security shall be contacted and shall respond. If the response of the safety officer or of security is inadequate to restore patient safety, the administrator on call shall be contacted and shall respond. 

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