The Joint Commission released a simplified breakdown of eight patient safety goals for hospitals in 2024.
The commission published an easy-to-read resource outlining goals for nine sectors of healthcare, including nursing facilities, surgery, hospitals and behavioral care.
Here are the eight patient safety goals for hospitals:
- Identify patients correctly — use at least two ways to identify patients, such as name and date of birth.
- Improve staff communication — Get the right test results to the right staff member on time.
- Use medicines safely — Label medicines that are not labeled prior to a procedure, take extra care with patients who take medicines that thin blood, and record and pass along correct information about patient medication.
- Use alarms safely — Make improvement to alarms on medical equipment so they are heard and responded to on time.
- Prevent infection — Use the CDC's hand cleaning guidelines and set goals to improve hand cleaning.
- Identify patient safety risks — Reduce risk of suicide.
- Improve healthcare equity — Treat improving equity as a quality and patient safety priority.
- Prevent mistakes in surgery — Ensure the correct surgery is done on the correct patient and in the correct location on the body, and pause before surgery to ensure that no mistake is being made.