The healthcare industry is boundless, encompassing a seemingly infinite network of organizations and individuals through a series of hospitals, doctors’ offices, specialists, manufacturers, and various other entities. To keep up with the growing demands of modern diseases and patient needs, healthcare providers must constantly work toward increasing understanding and sharpening the tools and techniques used to ensure meticulous care and continuous improvement. However, despite great efforts and cautious examinations, failures are made, setbacks are formed, and countless paths to improvement are littered with obstructions.
These obstructions are the natural byproduct of progress; born of trial and error. And though they sometimes manifest as conflicts in technology or limited resources, it is most notably our own human factors that frame the barriers we face in the healthcare industry.
What’s Plaguing Patients?
To truly evaluate quality improvement in healthcare, it is important to first recognize the concerns that directly plague patients. According to a study published in 2014 by the National Health Service, more than 175,000 patient complaints were placed between April 2013 and March 2014; nearly all of which were related to miscommunication, attitude of staff, appointment cancellations, and other cases explicitly impacted by human error. In contrast, very few of the totaled complaints submitted referenced expenses, equipment failures, medication discrepancies, or any other areas that might fall outside the parameters of human services. It reasons to say, therefore, that to understand and rectify the issues that arise in patient safety and satisfaction, we must turn our focus on the individuals administering care and performing the day-to-day tasks that influence healthcare practices and procedures.
Where are the Barriers?
Many of the barriers to quality improvement we face today in the healthcare industry can be easily attributed to matters of improper training, lack of education, and an overall carelessness in documenting the incidents, adverse events, and near misses that occur throughout cases of patient safety. These issues – often arising from individual uncertainty, lack of personal accountability, improper training, and outright laziness – can prove difficult to remedy without the proper means of identifying concerns and proposing methods for navigating future events.
By implementing a system designed to evaluate risk management and patient safety incidents, organizations can learn to properly approach these events and – through close examination and analysis – make the decisions that will help lower the barriers to quality improvement while alleviating patient concerns. Through a well-integrated system, organizations can receive individualized patient feedback, increase staff education, enact procedures to assist in incident reporting, manage claims, and asses the risks and alerts pertaining to patient care and safety.
As long as there is a healthcare industry, there will be occasional errors in human activity. But with the correct methods, procedures, and training, organizations can use these errors to learn how to maneuver subsequent events, tear down barriers, and continue to improve the quality of care and safety they provide their patients daily.