Introduction
The effectiveness of any health care organization is measured mostly based on the quality of care and the level of safety. This is mostly determined based on the patient outcome and general organization performance. One of aspect used to measure performance is the rate of medical errors which may result to hospitalization health complications, and preventable death. The cases of adverse event can be very harmful in to an organization. Medics are always required to do their best to safe life. Advance medical cases can be caused by a number of factors which include negligence, and unhygienic situation among other situations. Thus, such situations normally attract negative publicity, police investigations and government concerns. This paper discusses the adverse events in health care organization and their impact in a healthcare organization.
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Why Might Health Care Organizations and Staff Members be Reluctant to Report Adverse Events?
Reporting of errors in any healthcare organization is very important since it gives the organization a chance to improve itself and adapt safety culture. However, this does not always happen. Most health care organizations and their members of staff are reluctant reporting advance events to the relevant authority. This may be due to a number of reasons.
One of the main reasons is that the person involved may be punished in unfavorable way which may include suspension, dismissal or even attract a court case. Medical adverse are regarded mostly as negligence or manageable medical errors which were either done carelessly or due to unprofessionalism. In this regard, reporting these issues can easily land an employee into trouble that would cost them their career and result to legal battle (Wu et al., 2013).
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Some adverse event may cause death and incase an avoidable error is ascertain, it may subject the medical professional involved to be charged with murder case. Accepting that there are medical adversely is also likely to attract negative publicity of the organization. Thus in most cases, organization is reluctant to report adverse events as a way of protecting its reputation. Negative reputation in healthcare organization can easily put the customers off due to lack of trust. Such events may also result to revocation of organization operation license due to lack of compliance with the set safety and ethical standards. This can be very costly to a healthcare organization, and thus, they would rather cover it than suffer the consequences.
Financial and Nonfinancial Implications of Major Adverse Event on a Health Care Organization
Major adverse event in a health care organization can be very destructive. They mostly attract media publication which mirrors to the society an organization that does against what it was meant to do. This makes the society lose trust in it and maybe label. This results to massive exodus by patients or customers, impacting the general income of the organization. This may affect the organization’s financial sustainability (Zimlichman et al., 2013).
The tarnishing of the organization image may be an expensive this that may be considerably hard to recover from in the future. A lot may be needed to market the company to regain the customers trust. The cost of reversing or treating medical adverse events may inflict new expenses to the organization. Other possible impacts include threat to lose of the organization operational license, being under serious scrutiny of the regulation body, and sometimes loss of the government funding.
What can be Done by the Organization Leadership to Improve Adverse Events Reporting?
Leadership can enhance adverse events reporting by developing errors disclosure policy. The policy will clearly define errors, and the channels of reporting errors. The leader should also consider allowing errors reporting from patients, especially inpatients, and also from collogues. Patients should be encouraged to provide feedback, especially those that are in inpatient. An error reporting system should be developed where one can report errors anonymously and leave the management to make its own research. This will promote error reporting culture in a healthcare organization.
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