The National Patient Safety Goals is a quality and patient safety improvement program established by the Joint Commission in 2003. The NPSGs were established to help accredited organizations address specific areas of concern in regards to patient safety. [1] [2]
Medicare is the publicly funded universal health care insurance scheme in Australia, along with the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) operated by the nation's social security department, Services Australia. Medicare is the principal way Australian citizens and permanent residents access most health care services in Australia. The scheme either partially or fully covers the cost of most primary health care services in the public and private health care system. All Australian citizens and permanent residents have access to fully-covered health care in public hospitals, funded by Medicare, as well as state and federal contributions. International visitors from 11 countries have subsidised access to medically necessary treatment under reciprocal agreements.
Stoke Mandeville Hospital is a large National Health Service (NHS) hospital located on the parish borders of Aylesbury and Stoke Mandeville, Buckinghamshire, England. It is managed by Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust.
Medical tourism refers to people traveling abroad to obtain medical treatment. In the past, this usually referred to those who traveled from less-developed countries to major medical centers in highly developed countries for treatment unavailable at home. However, in recent years it may equally refer to those from developed countries who travel to developing countries for lower-priced medical treatments. With differences between the medical agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or the European Medicines Agency (EMA), etc., which decide whether a drug is approved in their country or region, or not, the motivation may be also for medical services unavailable or non-licensed in the home country.
The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) is an agency of the European Commission with responsibility for civil aviation safety in the European Union. It carries out certification, regulation and standardisation and also performs investigation and monitoring. It collects and analyses safety data, drafts and advises on safety legislation and co-ordinates with similar organisations in other parts of the world.
The Joint Commission is a United States-based nonprofit tax-exempt 501(c) organization that accredits more than 22,000 US health care organizations and programs. The international branch accredits medical services from around the world.
Patient safety is a discipline that emphasizes safety in health care through the prevention, reduction, reporting and analysis of error and other types of unnecessary harm that often lead to adverse patient events. The frequency and magnitude of avoidable adverse events, often known as patient safety incidents, experienced by patients was not well known until the 1990s, when multiple countries reported significant numbers of patients harmed and killed by medical errors. Recognizing that healthcare errors impact 1 in every 10 patients around the world, the World Health Organization (WHO) calls patient safety an endemic concern. Indeed, patient safety has emerged as a distinct healthcare discipline supported by an immature yet developing scientific framework. There is a significant transdisciplinary body of theoretical and research literature that informs the science of patient safety with mobile health apps being a growing area of research.
A Patient Safety Organization (PSO) is a group, institution, or association that improves medical care by reducing medical errors. Common functions of patient safety organizations are data collection, analysis, reporting, education, funding, and advocacy. A PSO differs from a Federally designed Patient Safety Organization (PSO), which provides health care providers in the U.S. privilege and confidentiality protections for efforts to improve patient safety and the quality of patient care delivery
The National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) was a special health authority of the National Health Service (NHS) in England. It was established in 2001 to monitor patient safety incidents, including medication and prescribing error reporting, in the NHS.
Antelope Valley Medical Center (AVMC) is a public hospital located in Lancaster, California specializing in acute care. It has 420 beds and is accredited by the Joint Commission. In March 2010 AVMC was declared one of the 14 trauma centers in Los Angeles County.
Hospital accreditation has been defined as “A self-assessment and external peer assessment process used by health care organizations to accurately assess their level of performance in relation to established standards and to implement ways to continuously improve”. Critically, accreditation is not just about standard-setting: there are analytical, counseling and self-improvement dimensions to the process. There are parallel issues in evidence-based medicine, quality assurance and medical ethics, and the reduction of medical error is a key role of the accreditation process. Hospital accreditation is therefore one component in the maintenance of patient safety. However, there is limited and contested evidence supporting the effectiveness of accreditation programs.
Bar code medication administration (BCMA) is a bar code system designed by Glenna Sue Kinnick to prevent medication errors in healthcare settings and to improve the quality and safety of medication administration. The overall goals of BCMA are to improve accuracy, prevent errors, and generate online records of medication administration.
Critical Test Results Management (CTRM) also known as Critical Test Results Reporting, and Closed-Loop Reporting, is the software that handles a medical test result that has come back as critical to a patient’s health. CTRM software prevents the critical result from being lost in communication failures, improves patient safety, and documents the delivery of the results.
The High 5s Project is an international patient safety collaboration launched by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2006. The project addresses concerns about patient safety around the world.
Health care quality is a level of value provided by any health care resource, as determined by some measurement. As with quality in other fields, it is an assessment of whether something is good enough and whether it is suitable for its purpose. The goal of health care is to provide medical resources of high quality to all who need them; that is, to ensure good quality of life, cure illnesses when possible, to extend life expectancy, and so on. Researchers use a variety of quality measures to attempt to determine health care quality, including counts of a therapy's reduction or lessening of diseases identified by medical diagnosis, a decrease in the number of risk factors which people have following preventive care, or a survey of health indicators in a population who are accessing certain kinds of care.
Alarm fatigue or alert fatigue describes how busy workers become desensitized to safety alerts, and as a result ignore or fail to respond appropriately to such warnings. Alarm fatigue occurs in many fields, including construction and mining, healthcare, and the nuclear power field. Like crying wolf, such false alarms rob the critical alarms of the importance they deserve. Alarm management and policy are critical to prevent alarm fatigue.
The Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority is an independent state agency located in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, United States. Its mission is to improve the quality of healthcare in Pennsylvania by collecting and analyzing patient safety information, developing solutions to patient safety issues, and sharing this information through education and collaboration. Its vision is safe healthcare for all patients. The Authority was established under Act 13 of 2002, the Medical Care Availability and Reduction of Error (MCARE) Act. The Authority began collecting Serious Events and Incidents in June 2004, making Pennsylvania the only state in the United States to require reporting of both of the aforementioned event types. Acute healthcare facilities that report events through the Authority include hospitals, ambulatory surgical facilities, birthing centers, and abortion facilities. In June 2009, the Authority began collecting infection reports from nursing homes.
J. Michael Henderson is an American general and transplant surgeon, with experience in portal hypertension, liver transplantation, and pancreatic disease. Henderson is the Chief Medical Officer at the University of Mississippi Medical Center since 2015. Prior to this role, he was with the Cleveland Clinic from 1992–2014. He was the Chairman of the Department of General Surgery and Director of the Transplant Center for 12 years, and was the Chief Quality Officer for the Cleveland Clinic’s 10-hospital system for eight years.
Medicines reconciliation or medication reconciliation is the process of ensuring that a hospital patient's medication list is as up-to-date as possible. It is usually undertaken by a pharmacist and may include consulting several sources such as the patient, their relatives or caregivers, or their primary care physician.
The International Patient Safety Goals (IPSG) were developed in 2006 by the Joint Commission International (JCI). The goals were adapted from the JCAHO's National Patient Safety Goals.
Dean Forrest Sittig is an American biomedical informatician specializing in clinical informatics. He is a professor in Biomedical Informatics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and Executive Director of the Clinical Informatics Research Collaborative (CIRCLE). Sittig was elected as a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics in 1992, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society in 2011, and was a founding member of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics in 2017. Since 2004, he has worked with Joan S. Ash, a professor at Oregon Health & Science University to interview several Pioneers in Medical Informatics, including G. Octo Barnett, MD, Morris F. Collen, MD, Donald E. Detmer, MD, Donald A. B. Lindberg, MD, Nina W. Matheson, ML, DSc, Clement J. McDonald, MD, and Homer R. Warner, MD, PhD.