Healthcare organizations use quality outcomes as measures to evaluate the performance of the nurses or the interventions towards healthcare issues. The outcome measures that are mainly evaluated for medication error are patient satisfaction, patient-reported outcomes, mortality, and readmission rates. There can be finance and process outcomes related to this, like the adherence to the guidelines and cost per patient or the duration of the patient’s stay. Both the quality and safety outcomes are essential to understand the severity of the issue. For example, in the case of medication errors, there is a decrease in the quality outcomes of patient satisfaction and trust the patients have in healthcare (Tariq et al., 2022). Regarding safety, 7,000 to 9,000 people die yearly due to medication errors in the US, and the cost of treating patients with medication errors exceeds $40 billion each year (Tariq et al., 2022). These significant consequences need interventions and outcome measures to address the situation effectively.
The strength of these outcome measures is that they help establish a benchmark for the organization to do better; there is recognition of the areas of weaknesses so they can be targeted with interventions and strategies; this also leads to increased accountability and or provides standardized and objective measures for the performance of the healthcare organization.
The weakness of these outcome measures can be the time-consuming process of collecting data and evaluating it. It may not reflect the exact perspectives of the healthcare providers and the patients. Outcome measures may also need to capture the external factors that impact the outcomes. For example, the mortality rates in healthcare could also vary with age, gender, and socioeconomic status rather than just medication errors. There is also a potential for manipulation; for example, to reduce the cases of medication errors, instead of interventions that educate the nurses, the organization may resort to strict punishments for healthcare providers, which may result in limited reporting of the cases by them leading to less number of cases overall.
The safety and quality outcome measures have strategic values that must be determined. They are essential as they help achieve an organization’s goals and make improvement plans. Strategic value can be provided to the organization by improving patient outcomes with increased satisfaction after the quality and safety outcomes enable the healthcare stakeholders to identify the areas where there can be an improvement to reduce medication errors. The organization can better understand where the staff is lacking and where there is underperformance. For example, standardized medication administration processes can improve the outcome measure of high readmission rates due to medication errors (Uitvlugt et al., 2021). The safety and quality outcome measures can also bring the organization’s value to the stakeholders, like the patients, clinicians, or nurses. For example, the outcome measure of high patient satisfaction may attract more patients to receive their treatment. This can increase revenue, making everything more cost-effective. The outcome measures also support decision-making related to different changes or interventions. For example, the Bar-code medication administration system (BCMA) intervention can be prioritized after evaluating the quality and safety outcomes of high mortality rates. This could be because BCMA has proven to be effective in reducing medication errors by providing intelligent tools that check prescriptions’ safety automatically to develop a culture of safety that is also timely (Naidu & Alicia, 2019).
The existing outcome measures can add value to the organization by combining all the measures, like patient satisfaction, adverse events, readmission rates, and mortality rates, to gain an even deeper understanding of the organizational performance. Trends can be studied through graphs and charts to see if the organization’s mission and goals are being met.
Since medication errors are rising and a severe concern for Vila’s health as they lead to adverse events and even fatalities, it is essential to analyze the relationships between medication errors and specific quality and safety outcomes. The specific safety and quality outcomes studied are adverse events, patient satisfaction, length of stay, mortality rate, and hospital readmissions. Medication errors are usually due to inadequate training of staff, lack of communication, high workload, and poor work environment. Such factors increase the risk of medication errors, leading to patient complications and ad
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