Ensuring Patient Safety and Comfort: A Strategic Management Plan - Essay Sample

Introduction

Patient’s safety and comfort at a health facility are among the fundamental requirements that aid for recovery. Various health facilities use different measures to ensure their patient’s welfare. However, for the stipulated rules to be useful and practical, a precise strategic management plan must be specified to give a clear direction on what needs to be done (Sheares et al., 2015). Strategic management is mainly focused on managing an organization based on its principal mission and vision. A strategic plan is a document that contains the guidelines and measures stipulated to facilitate the attainment of a particular set objective. Strategic management calls for desired levels of performance to ensure patients' safety and well-being in a health facility. Nonetheless, most health facilities have failed in this area due to the lack of proper planning and organization.

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Ensuring that the set objectives are attained, specific actions in line with the strategies should be deployed to bring the expected goals to reality. A practical action plan is mainly dependent on critical decision making and teamwork (Auffray et al., 2016). Organizational management comes up with an appropriate target to ensure the patient's safety in the health care facility. A selected team comes up with a reasonable action plan that could be employed to ensure that the set objectives are reasonable and attainable. Furthermore, the setting of expected deadlines offers a useful guideline towards achieving the set goals within the stipulated time (Auffray et al., 2016). Before activation of the action plans, adequate budgeting is critical for the allocation of funds to be utilized in that particular plan.

The monitoring of progress is critical in determining whether the project is workable. Reviewing and evaluating the set goals is essential in assessing the improvement of the project. Since management action planning requires a lot of step by step approach, several evaluations should be conducted to determine the strengths and weaknesses of a particular plan and necessary changes that need to be done regarding the same. An excellent and well-defined management action plan facilitates positive results within a health facility (Auffray et al., 2016). Attainable, measurable, and concrete action plans are fundamental and have a crucial role in the planning process as they determine the success and failure of the project. This project focuses on highlighting some of the essential components of management action planning and how they interrelate towards achieving a safe patient environment.

Developing a reasonable management action plan requires adequate cooperation and teamwork, and the MAP should have a six-step action plan to be successful. The first step in developing a management action plan is to define the problem. Developing that particular plan should be clearly stated (Tasleem et al., 2017). Patient safety has been a concern in many health facilities. Step two involves the collection and analysis of data. The collection of data regarding the defined problem is crucial in the evaluation of the severity of the problem stated. The selection of adequate data and cogent analysis is significant in insufficient planning and budgeting.

The third stage deals with clarifying and prioritizing the problems. Within a health facility, there might be more than one problem affecting the facility (Tasleem et al., 2017). Therefore, proper analysis of the collected data and sufficient decision making will aid in focusing on the most relevant problem and writing an appropriate goal statement and solutions for the problem stated in the critical activity in stage four. In this particular stage, objectives and deadlines are set, giving stipulated time within which the issue needs to be settled. The fifth step in management action planning is the implementation of the set strategies. The stage is also referred to as the action plan. The phase focuses on bring the established objectives to reality. The sixth and final stage revolve around monitoring and evaluation of the action plan (Tasleem et al., 2017). In this stage, the effectiveness and attainment of the set milestones are evaluated. In this phase, the evaluation of mini objectives is done to indicate the possibility of the final goals.

The table shows a sample of a management action plan in a health facility.

Problem identified Actions required Officer in charge Deadline How to know achievement Measurement of attained achievement

Patients have several issues affecting their safety within health institutions (WHO, 2017). Even though the patients being predisposed to inevitable accidents in the health facility, other possible risks such as security issues, diagnostic errors, and medication effects could be potential safety risks in the hospital. One of the actions required to ensure a patient's safety is by establishing a rapid response team to help during emergencies and accidents. Secondly, ensuring all employees understand the safety policy rules to avoid future incidents. Ward manager Mid October The best way to ascertain the action plan's results is through the establishment of a rapid response team. Another possible indicator is by an evident understanding of the safety policies by all employees in the health facility. A comparison between the number of accidents and other patient risk issues before implementing the action plan is a reliable way to measure the effectiveness of this plan. More so, when the number of accident cases within a particular health facility is reduced, it is a clear indication of positive results.

The relevance of using MAP in a health facility enhances the effectiveness in planning and implementation of various projects within a health system. The plan is very critical in determining the success of any particular project. Technological advancements in data analysis have facilitated accurate data evaluation, which is also essential in planning. The computing of MAP strategies into various management platforms leads to increased efficiency in decision making, leading to positive outcomes.

References

Sheares, B. J., Mellins, R. B., Dimango, E., Serebrisky, D., Zhang, Y., Bye, M. R., ... & Evans, D. (2015). Do patients of subspecialist physicians benefit from written asthma action plans?. American journal of respiratory and critical care medicine, 191(12), 1374-1383. https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1164/rccm.201407-1338OC

Auffray, C., Balling, R., Barroso, I., Bencze, L., Benson, M., Bergeron, J., ... & Del Signore, S. (2016). Making sense of big data in health research: towards an EU action plan. Genome medicine, 8(1), 71. https://genomemedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13073-016-0323-y

Tasleem, M., Khan, N., Shah, S. T. H., Saleem, M., & Nisar, A. (2017). Six Steps Implementation Framework For Corporate Sustainability Performance Management. Journal on Innovation and Sustainability, 8(3), 3-15. http://ken.pucsp.br/risus/article/view/34676

World Health Organization. (2017). Patient safety: making health care safer (No. WHO/HIS/SDS/2017.11). World Health Organization. https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/255507