PREVENTABLE MEDICAL ERRORS

Running head: PREVENTABLE MEDICAL ERRORS  1       Quality and Safety Gap Analysis – Preventable Medical Errors Name Institutional Affiliation    
Sign up to view the full document!
 
Showing Page:
2/8
 
PREVENTABLE MEDICAL ERRORS    2  Quality and Safety Gap Analysis – Preventable Medical Errors Introduction Provision of high quality treatment and care services, and patient safety are crucial aspects in contemporary healthcare systems. Quality and safety are neglected when the healthcare system lacks a proper framework to reduce and prevent errors, various risk factors and harm that occur to patients during care. Whenever they occur, poor quality and unsafe treatment and care practices cause adverse patient outcomes including injuries, burden of meeting healthcare costs and increased rates of morbidity and mortality. This paper aims at investigating preventable medical errors in a local healthcare system, their impacts on quality and safety as well as strategies that can be implemented to mitigate them and improve patient outcomes. Problems and Needs An error emanates from the act of using the wrong planned action to achieve a particular objective. Preventable medical errors are adverse events in the healthcare system that are caused by medical management and not from the patients’ underlying conditions (Ghaferi et al., 2016).  
According to Ahmed et al. (2019), preventable medical errors arise when the correct treatment path is neglected and a different treatment is used. Charles et al. (2016) agree with Melnyk et al. (2018) that these medical malpractices are aggravated by factors such as healthcare providers’  
fatigue leading to mistakes, user errors e.g. being unfamiliar with a system or failure to double-check information. Other factors include inexperience whereby the provider misuses diagnostic tools as well as prevalence of human errors arising from failure to follow the right guidelines and standards of care. Risks associated with medical practices pose major challenges and concerns to patient safety. Some of the most common sources of medical errors include misdiagnosis resulting in