Joint Commission Accreditation: Strengthening Patient Safety & Organizational Growth - Essay Sample

Introduction

The organization's MIPPA-approved accreditation body, specifically Joint Commission, enables the organization to pursue high-performance standards across all levels of healthcare coverage hence the organization to attract a large number of patients that contribute to organizational growth. The Joint Commission accreditation helps in the strengthening and organizing of patient safety measures to avoid health care system risks. The accreditation improves the overall patient safety and upgrades the care quality in the health care service provision. The Joint Commission accreditation also marshals the community efforts in strengthening of confidence levels that help achieve safety for patients, quality treatment services, and minimize risk exposure through the standards and measures it sets. The Joint Commission accreditation focuses on assessing the organization's risk management and quality assessment by specifically focusing on patient safety reduction of medical mistakes.

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The assessment standards and measures are integrated into the organizations working framework to improve service delivery and risk mitigation. The Joint Commission assessments emphasize the expansion of risk management programs by health care organizations to improve the quality of services, ensure patient safety, and minimize legal exposure. The Joint Commission accreditation initiates the clinical governance strategy that helps the healthcare organizations to put in place reliable systems and processes for monitoring, risk management, service improvement, and staff management (Cagliano et al. 2011). Clinical governance in healthcare organizations aims at improving the quality of services and guarantee patient safety with minimal medical errors. Health care competency is also a key aspect in JC standards; hence the assessment ensures that competency in the organization is upheld to ensure patient safety and minimal medical errors.

Lean management in an organization is an integral approach that significantly focuses on the improvement of safety, efficiency, and quality as critical components of the safety culture of the health care organization (Simons et al. 2015). The leadership in the healthcare organization undertakes measures to ensure the existing qualified personnel are provided with a pleasant working environment. The excellent working environment should be characterized by safety standards for both the staff and patients to ensure low-risk exposure and improve performance and quality of services. The top leadership in the organization develops policies and procedures that ensure all units of the organization operate within the set programs for efficient risk management and quality performance improvements.

The management levels initiate the safety and performance policies while the lower level tiers of the organization help in working within the set policies to realize the positive outcomes. The levels of leadership continually adhere to healthcare ethics in improving quality and safety standards. Employer and employee adherence to the set regulations, statutes, and accreditation requirements play a vital role in the leadership levels to ensure that governance structures create policies that comply with health system requirements. Leadership practices aim at emphasizing the importance of ethical knowledge and practice by an employee and the organization at large (Hariharan et al. 2006). The measures put in place would enhance standardization of the healthcare practice with global needs and adherence to healthcare ethics.

The risk management and compliance programs initiated by the organization aim at building and support the ethical standards, patient consent, and protection of patient rights and responsibilities. Clinic and patient safety program ensure that early warning process is provided in cases of potential compliance and ethical threats. The measures put in place ensure that the ethical standards are upheld in the efforts to streamline the activities in the health care organization. The programs prioritize compliance with ethical standards, patients' rights, and patient consent in areas where the risks prevail and threaten the critical components of the organization.

The organization, through its leadership, has established essential controls and policies to ensure that risk management and compliance programs are tailored to prioritize the organization's ethical and compliance needs. The organizational leadership is continuously provided with adequate information on existing healthcare risks to ensure they adequately formulate risk management and compliance programs that suit the risk factors. The data is vital as it ensures that all fundamental ethical, patient consent, rights and responsibilities, and compliance details are put into consideration to formulate reliable programs and policies for the organization. Hall et al. (2012) indicated that risk management and compliance programs prioritize addressing the ethical and legal risks to improve safety and quality of services to patients.

Patient safety is a critical aspect of health care professionals' efforts to undertake risk management measures and is grounded in an ethical and legal framework that should be upheld (Kadivar et al. 2017). Healthcare professionals have legal and ethical responsibilities while undertaking routine measures to manage risks and improve healthcare quality and performance. The role professionalism ensures that Root Cause Analysis is adequately conducted on patients' medical conditions and discloses medical errors as part of ethical and legal requirements. Kadivar et al. (2017) indicated that legal and ethical guidelines and standards create responsibilities for healthcare professionals to work accordingly in the course of upholding risk management and administering safe health care. The professional therefore has a moral value of focusing on the generation of positive outcomes and benefits through the protection of legal and ethical aspects of human dignity.

The professionals' legal and ethical responsibilities are integrated with the medical responsibilities to ensure that the execution of risk management policies is undertaken efficiently. The professionals have the role of providing adequate communication of the healthcare risks, and the management plan to guarantee patient safety. The communication plan ensures that proper consultations are undertaken to ensure reliable measures and follow up activities are initiated to mitigate the risk exposures. Healthcare practitioners have a legal and ethical role in promoting patient safety and satisfaction to reduce cases of litigation and patient complaints. According to Kumar et al. (2011), healthcare professionals play a vital role in undertaking legal, ethical, and medical responsibilities to existing patients from admission to discharge; hence they have the function to explain rights to patients, maintain confidentiality, and to address emotional needs of patients.

Quality improvement in healthcare involves the integration of efforts from all stakeholders to ensure patient safety and risk management and improve the competition level in the healthcare services (Chassin & Loeb, (2011). My organization's quality improvement processes have initiated measures that aim at achieving the desired health outcomes that are consistent and compliant to professionalism and healthcare requirements. The methods and tools initiated have contributed significantly to the elimination of medical errors that are caused mainly by inadequacies of the systems and medical processes. The quality improvement processes have continued to replace inefficient systems, initiating health insurance, and offering improved medical solutions to patients. The journey to healthcare excellence focuses on healthcare effectiveness, patient safety, equitable service delivery, minimal response time, and patient-centered health system. The health caregivers are subjected to continuous training and access to reliable information to ensure they operate medical technologies effectively to eliminate the errors. Ongoing on-the-job training refreshes professional knowledge and provides updates on emerging health issues to ensure professionals conduct themselves in executing their duties.

Patient safety is a delicate component in health care risk management that deserves a lot of attention from the quality improvement stakeholders. The quality measures initiated have continued to create health care services for patients and relaying all risk information and later communicating the same to the patient for consent. Quality improvement adopts a process improvement framework that enables the identification of system inefficiencies, classify errors, assess healthcare services and performance, and institute the corrective measures to realize a positive change. The total quality management process as a quality improvement process has initiated the improvement of all critical processes and procedures in the clinical practice. The organizational structure improvement process has significantly led to desired outcomes in terms of health care accessibility, availability, and the presence of quality resources in the organization. The continuous quality improvement lays the roadmap to excellence with healthcare service delivery programs and risk management. Quality interventions have since been common in correcting the existing inefficiencies in the health care system and have reduced the quality gap significantly, especially for patient care and safety strategies. The availability of reliable information and its transmission strategy has dramatically improved the quality of services that are undertaken based on full information, hence enhanced decision making for users.

References

Cagliano, A. C., Grimaldi, S., & Rafele, C. (2011). A systemic methodology for risk management in healthcare sector. Safety Science, 49(5), 695-708. https://iris.polito.it/retrieve/handle/11583/2371072/53012/Cagliano%20et%20al_SS_2011.pdf

Chassin, M. R., & Loeb, J. M. (2011). The ongoing quality improvement journey: next stop, high reliability. Health Affairs, 30(4), 559-568. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2011.0076

Hall, D. E., Prochazka, A. V., & Fink, A. S. (2012). Informed consent for clinical treatment. Cmaj, 184(5), 533-540. https://dx.doi.org/10.1503%2Fcmaj.112120

Hariharan, S., Jonnalagadda, R., Walrond, E., & Moseley, H. (2006). Knowledge, attitudes and practice of healthcare ethics and law among doctors and nurses in Barbados. BMC Medical ethics, 7(1), 7. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1472-6939-7-7

Kadivar, M., Manookian, A., Asghari, F., Niknafs, N., Okazi, A., & Zarvani, A. (2017). Ethical and legal aspects of patient’s safety: a clinical case report. Journal of medical ethics and history of medicine, 10. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6150915/

Kumar, R., Mehta, S., & Kalra, R. (2011). Knowledge of staff nurses regarding legal and ethical responsibilities in the field of psychiatric nursing. Nursing and Midwifery Research, 7(1), 1-11. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rajesh_Kumar697/publication/331062963_Knowledge_of_staff_nurses_regarding_legal_and_ethical_responsibilities_in_the_field_of_psychiatric_nursing/links/5c63c6a245851582c3e42368/

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