Question

1. Do nursing homes follow a safety management as traditional (safety programs), or is it taking a systems approach?

2. Which do you think is better, the traditional or systems approach?

3. Discuss a particular part(s) of each plan and which part you think will work, and what do you not like or you think will not work?

Answer 1

1. Safety systems in nursing homes aim to avoid harm to patients and their caretakers, health care professionals, hospital workers, volunteers, and other persons who are involved in the health care setting. Safety measures are essential for avoiding preventable harm as well as for rendering efficient services to the needy population. Safety measures are an ongoing process, therefore the nursing homes should establish a system to monitor the process and implement methods to prevent errors and enhance the quality of care.

2. The traditional safety management method is isolated and many times not integrated with the other functions of the nursing homes. In the traditional method, safety measures are described in the form of established rules, regulations, and safety instructions, but no active guidelines for implementation and also the emphasis on improving the process is missing. Nursing homes that implement system approaches in safety management are likely to execute quality assurance or quality guarantee. The definition of quality assurance dictates the safety events as a group of actions that are systematically planned and implemented within a nursing home for the prevention of occupational risks and affords trust to the public that the nursing home will provide excellent health care service in a safe atmosphere.

Based on these facts, I believe system approaches is suitable for nursing homes than the traditional means.

3. The system approach plan comprises six components – A safety plan, Polices, procedures and processes, training and induction, monitoring, supervision, and reporting.

Among these, I opine, training and induction, and monitoring are the effective mechanisms to ensure the safety measures.

· Nursing homes should conduct training programs so that every health care worker should become competent to safely perform the assigned tasks. The training should induct the workers about the safety risks in the health care set-up and the ways to handle them.

· Frequent monitoring and reporting is also an essential part to reduce errors and maintaining accountability for safety. Whenever there is a change in the workplace system, new risk assessments should be carried out and monitored to ensure that all risks have been eliminated.

o Policies procedures and processes are mere write-ups that describe mainly documentation of all events. Hence I consider this component has a minimal role in the safety process.

The traditional safety approaches believe that the future is relatively knowable, but in the complex modern health care systems, their future functioning cannot be predicted beyond a minimal extent. This aspect stop meeting the evolving safety needs of patients and society in the traditional method.