National Patient Safety Goals

The Joint Commission has published their National Patient Safety Goals in hopes to overall improve patient safety in 2012.  

Here are their hopes for the upcoming year: 

Identify patients correctly: health care workers should use at least two different ways to identify a patient. Also, workers should make sure that patients are getting the correct blood when getting a transfusion.

Improve staff communication: Important test results need to get to the right person on time.

Use medicines safely: Medicines that are not labeled need to have a label written on them. Also, patients who are taking medicines that thin their blood need to be given extra care. Patients need to have their medicine list recorded and passed along correctly.

Prevent infection: Set goals for improving hand hygiene, and use the hand cleaning guide from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the World Health Organization. Also, use proven guidelines to prevent infection from surgeries and catheters. 

Identify patient safety risks: Find out the patients that are more likely to commit suicide.

Prevent mistakes in surgery: Health care workers need to make sure that the correct patient is going to have the correct surgery in the correct place. The correct place where the surgery is to be done should be marked. Also, workers should pause before the surgery takes place to make sure a mistake has not been made.