National Patient Safety Goals (NPSGs) serve to improve patient safety. The reason why NPSGs are important is that they provide important tools for preventing the occurrence of medical errors, which are a major threat to patient safety. The patient safety enhancement tools are focused on issues such as patient identification, staff communication, use of medicines, use of alarms, infections, patient safety risks, and mistakes in surgery (The Joint Commission, 2015).
There are several goals that are relevant to my practice. The first one is the improvement of the safety of clinical alarm systems that are directly relevant to patient safety. Alarm systems are important because they alert caregivers about a patient who needs urgent assistance. The second goal relevant to my practice is the need to identify patients more accurately. This goal recommends use of at least two identifiers, of which the patient’s physical location in the ward is not one of them. Recommended identifiers are the patient’s name, identification number, and telephone number. The purpose of the patient identification goal is to ensure that care, treatment and service is received by the patient they are intended for. The third goal of major relevance is the prevention of hospital-associated infections. This might be achieved by following established hand hygiene guidelines (The Joint Commission, 2015).
In order to achieve the goals, some changes are necessary. There is a need to prioritize safe use of alarms, and subsequently develop a coordinated approach to the issue. The hospital might need to adopt a system for using two patient identifiers. The two identifiers should be clearly defined and standardized for the hospital. Further, there is need to initiate a program for enhancing compliance with hand hygiene. If nurses observe hand hygiene, they might greatly reduce the incidences of health-care-associated. For these changes to be successful there needs to be team responsible for implementing the change process (The Joint Commission, 2015).
Reference
The Joint Commission. (2015, November 5). Hospital: 2016 National Safety Goals. Retrieved from http://www.jointcommission.org/standards_information/npsgs.aspx
