When patients visit healthcare facilities for treatment, they hope to receive a high quality of care. However, facilities that don't have a complete and thorough patient safety plan or quality improvement plan in place could do more harm than good. Patient safety plans are formal documents that house guidelines and procedures for preventing unnecessary adverse outcomes for patients. They cover all aspects of quality improvement and can be a behemoth to develop, even for experienced administrative staff. To alleviate some of the burden, we’ll identify the elements that should be included in a patient safety plan for a medical facility.
Mission, Vision, and Values
At the start of the patient safety plan, facility administrators should outline the facility’s mission, vision, and values. Including sections such as these allows stakeholders to get to know your organization and what it’s all about. In addition to that, they give administrators the opportunity to explore the organization’s driving philosophy.
The mission, vision, and values sections in your patient safety plan should not be generalized. They should be drafted with a keen focus on patient safety, the provision of quality care, and the prevention of errors and subpar care.
Staff Roles and Responsibilities
A smooth patient care process relies upon the specific roles and responsibilities of each member of the patient safety team. So, it’s imperative to include prominent quality improvement staff members and their key duties. For instance, you may have a Quality Control Officer, a Patient Safety Officer, a Root Cause Analysis Officer, or all three. Also, if the facility has enacted a Patient Safety Committee, the names and roles of each committee member should be included in this section as well.
Goals and Objectives
The goals and objectives section is a crucial part of the patient safety plan. A simple list of goals and objectives will work well. As you draft this section, you’ll be able to identify areas of opportunity for improving patient outcomes and begin the planning process for resolution. It may be helpful to include expected completion dates and a designated party for each goal or objective.
Communication Guidelines
Ease of communication between medical staff and patient safety committee members is essential, as a breakdown in communication can result in the failure of even the most well-intentioned initiatives.
Accordingly, this section of the patient safety plan should cover how patient safety committee members and quality improvement staff should communicate:
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- With each other.
- With patients and their families (when necessary).
- With care providers (doctors, nurses, facility staff, etc.).
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A Diagram or Series of Steps from Issue Identification to Resolution
Patient safety personnel will work together with medical staff and patients to resolve problems. But the reality is that things can get hairy quickly if there’s no structure in place to do so. To impart some structure to the patient safety plan, add an easy-to-skim diagram or series of steps outlining what staff should do when an issue arises, from beginning to end.
You may include steps like:
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- Identify a problem
- Collect data and conduct analyses
- Find the root cause
- Identify and test solutions
- Note results
- Share results with pertinent parties.
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Feel free to elaborate on each step, indicating who is responsible for specific steps and what needs to be done to progress to the next step.
Data Collection Procedures
Your facility’s patient safety initiatives will be ineffective without adequate and ongoing data collection. For that reason, your data collection procedures should be outlined in detail in your patient safety plan. You may include procedures for collecting patient-reported outcomes data, EMR systems details, clinical trial results, external data from internet sources, and administrative data.
Privacy Provisions for Patients
Maintaining HIPAA compliance is paramount in any healthcare organization. So, a portion of the plan should cover the latest patient privacy guidelines and how to implement them. After all, protecting patients' identifying information is a safety issue.
Ongoing Monitoring Procedure
A proactive patient safety plan is bound to be more effective than a reactive one. Moreover, catching small problems before they balloon into monumental crises is in your organization’s best interest. To ensure that the patient safety committee and associated staff can act at the first inkling of an issue, there must be an ongoing monitoring procedure in your patient safety plan. In this section, administrators will outline how the organization plans to monitor high-risk exchanges between facility staff and patients.
Appendix of Terms and Definitions
People from all walks of life may read the patient safety plan, so it’s important to include a section that defines complicated terms and concepts. This section doesn’t have to be extensive - your administrator can use their own judgment.
Should You Use a Template for Patient Safety Plans?
With a simple internet search, you’ll find several patient safety plan templates from quality improvement organizations and random facilities. These can help to give you an idea of the proper formatting guidelines and content to include. You may be tempted to fill in one of these templates for your organization, but there are a couple of issues that could come up if you do:
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- The template may not encompass all of your organization’s processes, so it may not be very helpful.
- Many organizations use the same templates, making it more challenging for your facility to stand out from others.
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COVID-19 Considerations
In the unprecedented times, we’re living in, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention COVID-related patient safety considerations. With the ongoing threat of the virus, it’s imperative to add a section for mitigating COVID-related risks and minimizing the spread of the virus to patients or throughout your facility. Visitor restriction rules, routine cleaning processes, virtual visits, masking and vaccine requirements, and more should be clearly outlined in the plan so that all quality control personnel and medical staff are aware of this aspect of patient safety.
In addition, considering the fact that nurses everywhere are being infected with the COVID-19 virus, it’s crucial to be proactive in combating nurse shortages. So, in this section of the patient safety plan, administrators should include a staffing back up plan with procedures to follow in the event of a nurse shortage. Also, every facility employing nurses should have a competent nurse staffing agency on speed dial to quickly close gaps in the nurse workforce and ensure consistent, safe, quality care for patients.
We hope that this article gives you all you need to draft an effective patient safety plan and provide an outstanding quality of care for all of your patients.
