Institute for Healthcare Improvement Patient Safety Director Jennifer Lenoci-Edwards, RN, highlighted some of common types of patient harm and harm prevention strategies in a recent Q&A with Repertoire.
Listed below are five takeaways from the report on patient safety in primary care settings.
1. Some common types of primary care patient harms include delayed diagnosis due to poor test or referral management, treatments or diagnostics that don't align with evidence-based protocols and omitted or inadequate medication reconciliation.
2. Many healthcare providers in primary care feel patient safety materials and resources apply only to acute care settings, so they tend to disregard the tools. "For these reasons, patient safety concepts and training and methods for getting at information to reveal gaps and harm need to be modified and made more relevant and actionable for non-hospital settings," Ms. Lenoci-Edwards told Repertoire.
3. Similarly, many patient safety metrics — including those for catheter-associated urinary tract infections, ventilator-associated pneumonias and other infection rates — don't necessarily apply outside the hospital. That said, the metrics that do resonate with primary care physicians are not always easy to derive from current EMRs.
4. Improvements in quality and safety in primary care settings may be attributed in part to medical schools and allied health programs that are embedding these concepts into their curricula. "I believe that application of these tenets of improvement will increase the uptake and increase the chance of the concepts 'sticking,'" said Ms. Lenoci-Edwards. "We don't want the science of improvement to be another course that gets shelved once the semester is done."
5. According to Ms. Lenoci-Edwards, the primary responsibility for safety should fall under the umbrella of multidisciplinary leaders at the clinic or practice who "walk the talk" when it comes to improving quality, safety and patient engagement.
More articles on patient safety:
New American College of Radiology committee to focus on quality, patient safety
Screening pain patients improves safety, but decreases likelihood of successful treatment
5 things to know about communication errors, patient safety in general medicine