Winning the War on Healthcare Harm Summary

Question: Explain about Chasing Zero for Winning the War on Healthcare Harm Summary? Answer: Safety of patient is a worldwide challenge that necessitates skills and knowledge in several areas, including systems engineering as well as human factors. As seen in the documentary, a number of factors can contribute towards healthcare harm endangering the life of helpless people who have completely entrusted their lives to medical professionals. Human as well as technological errors can cause loss of life as well as severe legal actions against the hospital and the hospital personnel. Technological and manufacturing errors such as similar labelling of drugs or their covers, software errors leading to wrong prescription for the patients or wrong composition of medicines often leads to wrongful human errors and might risk the life of patients. Similarly, human errors such as lack of proper communication among medical personnel, not paying much attention to the drug or drug composition to be administered might always cause serious risk to the patient. The vital weapons against health care harm are leadership, safe practices and technology; leadership means involvement of the hospital and health care facilities with experts and leaders in the healthcare field to understand and effectively implement new and innovative methods in the institutions for better healthcare, safe practices like the WHO checklist and National Quality Forum safe practices must be practiced by every healthcare facility around the world and of course implementing these practices in coordination with latest technology will lead to elimination of healthcare harm. Some institutions like the Mayo clinic have great coordination among nurses, routine briefing by the leaving nurse to the nurse taking over by personally interacting with the patient is followed which makes the nurse and the patient comfortable with each other and also leads to effective management by the nurse as she get well acquainted with the patients treatment. The IHI checklist formulated by medical students has also helped in making things simpler, predictable, standardized and enhanced communication. New and innovative platforms such as CPOE simulator and automated infection identification and medication systems (AIIMS) that is used to identify and prevent impact of infections using computer systems have additionally helped in better management of health of patients. Thus, as a novice health care provider, I would encourage better coordination among healthcare personnel as well as use of latest technology to elimination healthcare harm and promote a safer medical environment.