Theoretical Definitions and Ethical Principles Related to Patient Safety

Theoretical Definitions and Ethical Principles Related to Patient Safety

Theoretical Definitions

• Patient safety: This individual healthcare discipline focuses on reducing and preventing the occurrence of errors and other risks that can compromise the general provision of care to patients.
• Medical errors: An adverse effect in the care of a patient includes such aspects as incomplete diagnosis or any other incomplete treatment of an ailment or infection. Medical errors significantly hinder the quality of patient safety in the clinical environment.
• Accident: In the concept of healthcare, accidents are various events that results in the damage of particular systems. Such damage to individual system serves to disrupt the future or ongoing output of the individual system (Galt & Paschal, 2015). The occurrence of accidents in the healthcare environment can considerably affect the wellbeing of the patient in that healthcare organization.
• Adverse event: Refers to any injury that is as a result of a medical intervention. Most often, in the healthcare setting, adverse events arise as a result of various medical errors or any other intrinsic adverse reaction that might not be related to medical errors. Adverse events in healthcare might also come about as a result of factors that are not associated with medical errors.

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• Latent error: Latent errors are mostly errors that are as a result of the individual design, training, maintenance or the organization in itself. Latent errors most often lead operator mistakes that mainly lie unrecognized in the healthcare system for extended durations of time.
• Active error: Unlike latent error in healthcare that might serve to disrupt the entire system gradually, active error, as it pertains to healthcare occurs at the front-line of an organization’s operator and its individual effects are felt and recognized immediately. The patients are the ones that are mostly affected by active errors in the healthcare environment, followed by other healthcare officials (Galt & Paschal, 2015).
• Human factors: Focuses mostly on the different interrelationships that exist amongst human beings and the various tool that they use in the healthcare environment and the environment that they live in and work. Social factors in relation to overall patient safety might also take into consideration the evaluation and testing of methodologies that might have a dormant effect in the healthcare system for extended durations of time.
• Quality of care: In relation to overall patient safety, quality of care refers to the individual degree to which various health services for patients and the general population raises the chances of desired outcomes of healthcare and how the chances of desired results of healthcare are consistent with the existing professional knowledge. Galt & Paschal (2019) stresses that, in regards to where we might be located in the system of healthcare and the type of responsibilities that we might have, there exist several expression of quality that are legal.
• Standard: In relation to overall safety, a standard refers to the minimum level of agreeable result or performance. A standard might also refer to an individual spectrum of acceptable results and achievements. In the healthcare environment, there exist a wide range of standards amongst them standard practice, standard guide and standard terminology.
• System: When overall patient safety is concerned, a system refers to a defined interdependent element that interacts with another element to arrive at a common aim. The different elements in healthcare might include or refer to both human and non-human elements (Galt & Paschal, 2015). Regardless, in healthcare, all systems have a human interface and dependency.
• Microsystems: Refers to any organization unit that is built around the meaning of respectable significant service competencies. A Microsystem as it relates to patient safety has various elements which include a significant group or team of healthcare professionals and a particularly defined group or population of patients. A Microsystem also takes into account a properly designed work processes.
• Patient safety practice: When the overall patient safety is concerned, patient safety practice refers to an individual structure or process whose individual application reduces the chance of adverse events that might come about as a result of exposure to the general health system across a spectrum of procedures and conditions.

Ethical Principles Related to Patient Safety

• There is a myriad of issues in healthcare that compromises the overall aspects of patient safety. Issues such as medical errors and infections play a fundamental role in reducing the overall safety of patients in the healthcare environment.
• In healthcare, ethical principles are determined and judged by two significant classifications, i.e. deontology and utilitarianism. Deontology is a line of thinking in healthcare that necessitates that the end goal of healthcare and the means be ethical and morally upright. On its part, the utilitarian line of thinking requires that the end goal should justify the means even in the cases that the means are not morally upright (Peter, 2018).

Ethical principles

• In healthcare, the individual ethical principles that are related to patient safety are beneficence, non-malfeasance, the principle of Justice and fidelity. Also, nurses ought to adhere to the ethical principles of veracity, autonomy and accountability.
• Justice: When it comes to Justice in the clinical setting, Justice relates to fairness (Peter, 2018). In all of their dealings, nurses ought to be fair in terms of the distribution of care to patients. Nurses should, at all times, strive to ensure that the care accorded to patients is equitable and justly distributed to the patients that they are taking care of. By being just, nurses advocate for the safety goals of the patient in terms of preventing medical errors that can occur in Surgery.
• Beneficence: On the other end of the ethical divide, beneficence entails doing good at all times and always practicing what is right to the patients that one might be trusted to take care. Regardless of the circumstances that a nurse finds themselves in, they ought to at all times do what is right and never compromise their obligations to do what is suitable for the patient’s sake. Nurses advocate and facilitate for such aspects of safety goals as using medications safely and preventing the contraction of infections by practicing beneficence (Milliken, 2018).
• Non-malfeasance: Most often this ethical principle is misunderstood for the opposite of beneficence, but it entails doing no harm to the patient at any given circumstance (Heale & Shorten, 2016). As dictated by the ethical principles of the healthcare setting, nurses ought to practice beneficence at all times. The harm that this ethical principle refers to might either be intentional or unintentional. Lack of intentions of harming the patient means that the nurses involved might do anything that is within their power to eliminate such risk factors as bed sores and infections amongst the patients that they attend to.
• Accountability: Amongst all other professionals, nurses ought to be accountable for their actions. In the healthcare environment, medical errors and other mistakes might occur, which might significantly impact the safety of the patient. Regardless of these happenings, nurses are ethically obliged to take full responsibility for their actions and ensure that patient safety is considerably improved (Salisbury, 2019). Failure to be accountable for one’s actions means that the health of a patient might be jeopardized or compromised and the nurse involved might get away with the wrong doing. Failure to practice self-accountability might considerably lead to a decreased patient safety in the healthcare environment.
• Fidelity: Another important ethical principle that relates to patient safety and healthcare safety goals in the healthcare environment is fidelity. Fidelity entails keeping one’s promise. Nurses have the promise of being faithful to the patient that they take care of and delivering the best quality care possible to such patients. Regardless of the work environment that this might find themselves in or any factor, nurses ought to keep and deliver their promise of providing the best quality of care possible to their patients.
• Autonomy: This is another significant ethical principle that relates to overall patient safety and wellbeing. Autonomy refers to nurses accepting that the patient is a separate entity that has various innate rights and is entitled to their own beliefs, values and opinions (Galt & Paschal, 2015). As an ethical consideration, nurses should, at all times, encourage their patients to make personal decisions and judgments without being coerced by clinicians and nurses. This ethical consideration gives the patient the right to refute or accept treatments accorded to them. In relation to safety goals, patients are able to recover effectively from any ailment when they are given the right to choose what they think is right for their bodies. Giving the patient the right to chose what is best for them minimizes instances of associated risks in healthcare.
• Veracity: Is an ethical principle that necessitates nurses to be truthful with their patients without withholding any truth whatsoever to the patient even if such truth might lead to the patient being distressed. By being truthful with the patient, nurses are able to urge their patients to take medication as recommended by the doctor. Being open or truthful with the patient promotes safety goals in that patients are able to understand their medical condition and get the necessary treatment that they deserve before their health situation gets out of control.

References

Galt, K. A., & Paschal, K. A. (2015). Key concepts in patient safety. Jones & Bartlett Publishers. Retrieved from
http://samples.jbpub.com/9780763763381/63381_ch01_final.pdf

Heale, R., & Shorten, A. (2016). Ethical context of nursing research. Evidence-Based Nursing, 20(1), 7-7. Retrieved from https://ebn.bmj.com/content/20/1/7

Milliken, A. (2018). Ethical Awareness: What it is and why it matters. The Online Journal in Nursing, 23(1). Retrieved from http://ojin.nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/ANAMarketplace/ANAPeriodicals/OJIN/TableofContents/Vol-23-2018/No1-Jan-2018/Ethical-Awareness.html

Peter, E. (2018). Overview and summary: Ethics in healthcare: Nurses respond. The online journal of Issues in Nursing, 23(1).  Retrieved from https://ojin.nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/ANAMarketplace/ANAPeriodicals/OJIN/TableofContents/Vol-23-2018/No1-Jan-2018/O-S-Ethics-in-Healthcare.html

Salisbury, H. (2019). Helen Salisbury: Balancing patient safety and autonomy. BMJ, l4948. Retrieved from https://www.bmj.com/content/366/bmj.l4948/rr