Analysis of Error in Risk Management at the Work Setting
Analysis of Error in Risk Management at the Work Setting
Introduction
I visited a local health facility in Orlando, California where I attended a committee meeting of the board of management. The agenda for the meeting included the topic of risk management changes, which needs to be implemented in order to avoid more financial expenditure. The members present deliberated upon the various cause of the risks, evaluation of the possible failures and their impact in the management system in addition to the various serious safety events in the hospital. This paper seeks to discuss the information received from the meeting and evaluate the status of the risk management within that work setting in improving the quality processes.
The hospital is a large health facility, which provides health services to many people. The everyday risks associated with the provisions of the services include patient and safety risks, physical plant hazards, staffing risk and waste disposal mechanism risks (Dolanskyet al, 2013). The patient and safety risks are caused by careless or inappropriate prescription and administration of medicine and procedures. The errors were found to physical injury and lead to other illnesses. These events force the hospital to spend monies on the victims as compensation. The physical plant hazards are as a result of the improper usage by the staff.
During the meeting, it was found that some of the nurses and doctors either do not know the procedure of operating the machines or use them for the wrong purpose. For example, there were complaints that the radio therapy machine causes body injury to the doctors and patients when they are overexposed to the radio waves. Staffing risks such as the increased mortality rate of patients caused fatigue of the nurses and doctors, who have to serve many patients at any one given time. Also, the solid and fluid waste causes injury and infection to the visitors, doctors and patients because they are poorly disposed. For example, used needles and remains of used medicine are deposited in an open incinerator, but is left for a long time before it is burned some of which get displaced to the paths where they injure passersby.
Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA)
Failure mode refers to the various ways in which a process might be unsuccessful while the effect analysis is concerned with the weight of differing degrees of failures (Shahrami et al., 2013). The board identified that the risk management system it has is weak and might cause them to spend more money in compensating victims of injuries. For example, the general regulation, which require doctors to be careful when prescribing a drug to a patient can sometimes be violated when the diagnosis of the treated illness is wrong. The impact of this kind of failure differs depending on the type of medicine the patient is given or the procedure undertaken such as surgery. For instance, where a patient is suffering from malaria, and he is given diarrhea medication, the patient would not be impaired more than the other who has undergone brain surgery for non-existent brain tumor. For that reason, the board urged the doctors and the nurses to be careful when examining or administering medication to the patients. The area which needed improvement was treatment of minor injuries such as open wounds and common illnesses such as malaria and influenza where many patients had complained that they receive painkillers instead of proper medication.
Serious Safety Events
The serious safety event discussed in the meeting was medical prescription errors and administration. In particular, there was a complaint that a patient suffered trauma during and after he underwent an improper surgical procedure during a brain surgery. The doctor injected the patient with a mild anesthesia, who then woke up in the middle of the surgery process. It was agreed that necessary measure would be taken to avoid future problems.
Summary and Evaluation
The hospital holds such meetings every last Friday of the month. In conclusion, I found that the hospital had effective measures of risk management in providing health services. These measures are important because they ensure that the hospital’s vision to improve the quality of health services they deliver. However, the management needs to put up follow up procedures to ensure that the recommendations made at the meeting are implemented to avoid future attachment of risks and the consequential unnecessary financial expenses.
References
Dolansky, M. A., Druschel, K., Helba, M., & Courtney, K. (2013). Nursing student medication errors: a case study using root cause analysis. Journal of professional nursing, 29(2), 102-108.
Shahrami, A., Rahmati, F., Kariman, H., Hashemi, B., Rahmati, M., Baratloo, A., & Safari, S. (2013). Utilization of Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) Method in Increasing the Revenue of Emergency Department; a Prospective Cohort Study. Emergency, 1(1), 1.
