Most patients come to a doctor, nurse, or other health workers because of trust. They believe, after attending to them, their ailing health problems could go away.
However, if you’re not careful as a health worker, you could commit some errors. This might worsen the health condition of your patient. Also, some medical mistakes can even be the cause of patients’ deaths. But with the correct information, you could avoid some medical errors and improve your patients’ health conditions.
A medical error is any preventable act leading to possible inappropriate medication and diagnosis to a patient. Also, medical errors can occur at any stage of medication. This includes when collecting patient data, prescribing medication, conducting surgeries, and during laboratory tests.
How Health Workers Could Reduce Medical Errors
Common causes of medical errors include poor communication, techniques, or procedures. Read more to learn how health workers could reduce medical errors in various ways.
1. Use The Right Equipment
Though there are several tools in the medical world, each is utilized for a specific purpose. This is why hospital staff needs to use the right equipment at the right time. Also, it helps attend to the patient more effectively and efficiently.
For instance, if a health worker is doing some surgery on a patient, they can use BFW’s LED surgical headlight system and other essential tools. Also, BFW’s LED surgical headlight system provides a bright light source to medical workers when conducting surgery on patients.
There are several benefits of utilizing a proper surgical headlight system. This allows hospital staff to visualize even the smallest structures within the body.
Also, this equipment helps medical workers avoid straining their eyes during a surgical procedure. Thus, it lessens the chances of committing errors when conducting sensitive surgical procedures.
2. Practice Good Communication
Another effective way to minimize medical errors by hospital staff is by practicing proper or effective communication. This is important because the medical world involves taking and giving instructions.
This is to ensure the correct information is passed to the intended recipient. Some of these include active listening, articulated instructions, correct verbal and non-verbal cues. Written instructions should also be properly communicated.
3. Perfecting Their Handwriting
Also, health workers can help minimize medical errors by perfecting their handwriting. This involves using legible handwriting for anyone to read.
One major advantage of health workers using legible handwriting is that it allows pharmacists to read correctly, thus giving the patient the correct medication. Note that when a health worker’s handwriting isn’t legible, it can cause errors in filling a prescription, thus harming the patient.
4. Proper Documentation
Another best way to prevent medical errors by hospital staff is by documenting everything. This ensures that all patient records are correctly recorded and documented. Proper documentation not only helps follow the healthy history of a patient, but it also helps avoid wrong medication.
Apart from helping avoid errors, an automated document management system allows health workers to save a lot of time. This is possible because they’ll no longer need to take hours to peruse through piles of files searching for patient information. They only need to log in to a computer, type in the patient’s information to have it displayed on the screen.
5. Ensure Precise Medication
Most medical errors occur due to wrong medication. So, medical staff workers must also ensure they administer the proper medication to the right patient. This calls for hospital workers to do thorough health examinations on their patients to ensure proper medication.
Besides, it would be good for hospital workers to keep patient records separately and organized to avoid administering the wrong medications. Health workers should also double-check the medication list, time, and dose before administering it to the patient.
6. Correct Medicine Storage
Some medical errors can happen due to poor storage of medicine. For instance, various drugs or medicines require different environments to be more effective. So, when such drugs aren’t properly stored, they can harm patients after taking them.
Nurses and other health workers can avoid this by properly storing hospital medicine. That said, it’s the responsibility of health workers to understand different drugs and their storage requirements.
7. Avoid Overworking
Another cause of medical errors is when health professionals work when they’re tired. This occurs especially when they’ve worked for long hours without taking a break. This might cause human errors in the medical field.
Therefore, when health professionals get tired, they should consider taking a break for a few hours before they resume work. Besides, hospital workers should take regular leaves to help reduce fatigue.
8. Train Health Workers
The medical world is changing quickly because of the outbreak of new health issues that weren’t there before. So, medical professionals are constantly looking for effective ways to handle new health conditions.
Besides, medical professionals seek the most efficient ways to treat ailments. For that reason, new technologies have been introduced in the medical field.
Thus, health workers need to upgrade their training to help them stay ahead of technology. Not only will this help streamline the medical processes, but it will also help minimize errors.
This is possible because, through training, they’ll acquire some knowledge in handling modern tools and equipment. Also, they could be updated with certain protocols and guidelines that might help lessen medical errors.
Besides, continuous training allows health workers to adopt the best practices of administering medicine.
Takeaway
Medical errors are a major issue in the medical world. This happens when nurses or other health workers fail to follow the proper procedure when administering medication to their patients.
That’s why several medical malpractice cases are being reported from time to time. However, health workers can prevent medical errors by implementing the tips mentioned above. This might help avoid personal injury lawsuits.