504S-The Drive towards “Quality” Care
The center for Medicare announced that it would not reimburse hospitals that injure their patients with errors known as the “never events.”The policy will genuinely improve patient care since medical practitioners will have to avoid the mistakes or otherwise face the decision as to how to bill the patient(Never Events, n.d.). To prevent the errors, health care providers and their hospitals will have no choice but to develop prevention strategies as well as to address human factors leading to errors.
According to the “never events” payment policy, most of the “never events” are reasonably preventable if the evidence-based guidelines are followed. Therefore, health care providers will embark on developing a prevention strategy. With the prevention strategy, health care providers can avoid errors as it allows them to know and follow the expected guidelines. For example, a prevention strategy that involves debriefing before surgery will improve the quality of care in that during the debriefing; staff can run down the checklist for Joint Commission’s Universal Protocol for surgery. As a result, the health care providers can be reminded of the essential steps to take to avoid errors in the procedure, leading to improved quality of patient care.
From its analysis, the payment policy found that dozens of human factors contribute to the “never events.” To eliminate the errors, hospitals will determine the factors responsible for the damages and find ways to address the issues. For instance, if a hospital discovers that surgical staff who made errors often worked in an environment with a culture of non-oversight, it will re-evaluate its oversight and supervisory factors to ensure that their surgical team follows the conventional procedures. Therefore the surgical staff will take extra caution leading to improved patient care.
Reference
Never Events. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://psnet.ahrq.gov/primer/never-events