Patient Safety Goals

The Joint Commission has released its national patient safety goals for 2013. The purpose is to improve patient safety and to focus on the problems in health care safety and how they can be solved.

Identify Patients Correctly:

• When a patient is getting a blood transfusion, make sure they are getting the correct blood.
• Use at least two ways to identify the patient
• Example: Patient’s name and DOB 

Improve Staff Communication:

• Get important test results to the right staff member quickly and on time.   

Prevent Infection:

• Use proven guidelines to prevent infection after surgery, of the blood from central lines, of the urinary tract that are caused by catheters, and those that are difficult to treat.
• Set goals to improve hand cleaning; follow guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the World Health Organization on how to correctly wash hands.  

Identify Patient Safety Risks:

• Find out which patients are more likely to try to commit suicide. 

Use Medicines Safely:

• Correctly record and pass on correct information about a patient’s medicines; make sure patient understands what medicines to take and when.
• Before a procedure, make sure medicines that are not labeled are labeled correctly. 

   

Prevent Mistakes in Surgery:

• Make sure the correct place on the patient’s body is marked before surgery.
• Make sure the correct surgery is going to be performed on the correct patient at the correct place.
• To make sure a mistake is not going to be made, pause right before the surgery to double check.