Patient safety is paramount in healthcare today, Health Information and Quality Initiative: Reflection on Nursing Essay, RCSI, Ireland

Patient safety is paramount in healthcare today, Health Information and Quality Initiative. The World Health Organisation in collaboration with the Global Patient Safety Collaborative identified safety as one of the most important factors in healthcare delivery worldwide.

Safety can be defined as preventing harm, and as outlined in the Quality of Practice: Principle 3 Nursing and Midwifery Board Ireland, nurses, and midwives are at the center of patient care and play a pivotal role in delivering safe, quality equitable care. To ensure the care delivered is of optimum quality, it must be safe, patient-centered, beneficial, and efficient Health Service Executive Quality Framework.

Safety and risk are interlinked. Identifying the risk, or the possibility of harm, addressing the risk, and managing the risk is everyone’s responsibility. Medication errors were identified as the most prevalent risk worldwide today in our healthcare system. Kavanagh supports this and agrees that medication errors are a notable cause of harm to patients. Promoting medication safety in the healthcare setting, therefore, is crucial in reducing the risk of medication errors and the risks associated with our patients.