Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Medicine Essay

DEVELOPING ORGANIZATIONAL POLICIES AND PRACTICES
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Developing Organizational Policies and Practices
Health care facilities and organizations need to enforce policies and practices that help in achieving their targets and goals. However, there are several issues/stressors in the health care facility that hinder the achievement of these set goals and targets. The main goal and target of all health care facilities are to provide the best health care while improving patient outcomes. These stressors/issues make it difficult for health care organizations to achieve that. Therefore, it is important for health care organizations to set policies and practices that help to counter this health care issues and stressors.
One of the most common health care stressors/issues in many health care organizations is medical errors. Medical errors are a threat to patient safety. According to John Hopkins research, medical errors cause around 250,000 deaths in the United States per year (Sipherd, 2018). These medical errors result due to the following various reasons, according to Gorgich and the others (2016), which include lack of trained personnel, such as nurses in the health care facilities, wrong medication calculations, and unreadable orders in medicine cards. Also, according to Mayo Clinic Staff (2020), medical errors can be a result of poor communication between the doctors, dosing errors, and duplicate medications. The health care facilities should enforce policies and practices that help to avoid these causes of medical errors.
There are some evidence-based practices that can be put in place to minimize medical errors in health care facilities. As noted by Weant and the others (2014), some of the practices and policies that can be put in place to reduce medication errors include the use of automated dispensing cabinets, medication-error analysis, computerized-order entry systems, and bar-coding systems, providing education to physicians regularly, and standardizing medication-use processes. There are also practices to ensure to prevent medication errors, as put across by Rodziewicz and Hipskind (2020). These practices include providing up-to-date information on drugs, especially the new drugs, providing specific information about a drug, and avoiding disruptions while administering treatment.
There are also other competing needs in the health care facility other than the need to prevent medical errors. These needs divert the attention of the health care facility’s management. Some of these include the need to employ more nurses and expand the need to expand the facility. There is the pressure of shortage of nursing staff in most health care facilities in the United States, as noted by Haddad and the others (2020). They have attributed this to many people are aging in the United States, which increases the need for health care attention. Also, that is attributed to the rapidly growing population in the United States, hence increasing the demand for health care services. Therefore, most health care facilities are working so hard to employ more nurses so as to facilitate patient satisfaction. In addition to that, most hospitals and other health care facilities are focused on expanding their facilities to ...