Now that you’ve built your patient safety team, and set goals to improve patient safety in your healthcare institution, what next? Well, you need to measure your progress to know if your programs, initiatives, and investment are paying off!
Here are a few ways to measure and record the effectiveness of your patient safety initiatives:
Measure outcomes
This is a way to quantitatively measure your success. If your goal is to increase patient satisfaction scores, record and track your scores over the course of a week, month, quarter, and year. You can then correlate changes in average scores to initiatives you may have undertook during that period to see which were contributing factors.
Record processes
If your goals are related to changes in process, be sure to document original and new processes completely. This information will be combined with other data to determine the effectiveness of your processes.
Evaluate balancing measures
Changes to part of the process could impact other parts of your system so these should be monitored and balanced to ensure equilibrium. It’s possible that your goal of decreasing waiting room time, causes a backlog of patients in exam rooms that you just don’t have the doctors and nurses to effectively handle in a timely manner. You need to analyse the entire system to ensure nothing is being unduly sacrificed.
Gather information
Not all data is measurable with stats and figures. It’s important to ask staff and patients to share their experiences and opinions about your patient safety programs.
If you’re designing and planning new patient safety programs in your facility, check out the new products Essential Medical Products carries to see if they can help you reach your safety goals and increase patient comfort.
