Process Guide and Map with Strategies to Improving Healthcare Services

Accurate Patient Identification
Name
School Affiliation
Step 1: Defining Patient Values
Value the views of patients on healthcare with the end goal being patient's safety and quality
Step 2: Mapping the Process
Involves figuring out the problem/situation
Step 3: Validating the Process Map
Receiving critique that is aimed towards fixing the raised issues
Step 4: Planning Change
Come up with a conclusion or answer
In many countries, medical errors have been considered among the leading causes of death. Among these deaths, errors linked to mistaken patient identification are arguably among the easiest types of mistakes to avoid. Essentially, the most feared and well-known patient errors are the surgical errors - wrong procedure, wrong patient, or improper site surgeries. The most common is the daily errors that lead to less severe morbidity, such as correct medication being given to the wrong patient due to similarities in the patient's names (Ding et al., 2016). Such errors from the sample or patient misidentification have led to testing results and diagnoses attributed to wrong patients, wrong medication given to patients, and infants being discharged to wrong families.
The first step is to analyze data and outcomes. Hence, it has been determined that mistakes based on patient identification errors consist of wrong patient data entry, incorrect patient registration, the biological specimen being collected from the wrong patient, incorrect entry of orders, and missing clinical information. The major issue arises from identification errors involving infants, who cannot identify themselves (Copeland, 2019). Traditionally, infants were identified using their mother's last name. However, this approach also had problems because names were common, and hospitals recorded high numbers of birth in a single day.
The second step is setting goals or objectives. Therefore, the main objectives of improving patient identification accuracy are using more than two identifiers on a patient when providing treatment, services, and care, and doing away with transfusion errors linked to patient misidentification. Errors can occur virtually at any stage, and they can be avoided by following a simple practice of making use of more than one patient identifier (Buljac-Samardzic et al., 2020). This strategy works based o...