With the advent of new technologies and treatment methods, health care organizations are facing many challenges. Patient safety is one such challenge that needs to be addressed not only by health care professionals but also by other stakeholders in the business. Ensuring patient safety is essential for providing quality health care.

Applying Library Research Skills

Learner’s Name

Capella University

NHS4000: Developing a Health Care Perspective

Instructor Name

August, 2020

Applying Library Research Skills

With the advent of new technologies and treatment methods, health care organizations

are facing many challenges. Patient safety is one such challenge that needs to be addressed not

only by health care professionals but also by other stakeholders in the business. Ensuring patient

safety is essential for providing quality health care.

As a medical transcriptionist, I am responsible for converting voice-recorded reports of

health care professionals into text. Although I am not directly involved in treating patients, any

errors that occur during the transcription process could result in inaccurate documentation of

medical data. For example, one of my colleagues documented the dosage of Lasix as 400 mg

instead of 40 mg in a discharge summary. When the health care professional who had dictated

the report reviewed it, he was able to spot the error in the dosage and correct it, which helped

prevent the patient from having a dangerous reaction to the incorrect dosage. This incident

helped me realize the importance of preparing accurate documents for ensuring patient safety

and delivering quality care. I developed a keen interest in issues relating to patient safety ever

since.

Identifying Academic Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles Using

Summon, a search engine that searches across Capella University Library’s databases, I accessed

articles that are carried by databases such as ProQuest Central and PubMed Central. I used

keywords such as “health care issues,” “patient safety,” and “quality of care” to search for peer-

reviewed literature relevant to patient safety. Using the advanced search option, I limited my

search to scholarly and peer-reviewed journals, choosing “journal article” as the publication type,

“medicine” and “nursing” as the subjects, and articles published within the last five years as the

publication date range.

Assessing Credibility and Relevance of Information Sources

To ensure credibility, I selected peer-reviewed journal articles that were published within

the past five years. I made sure that the selected sources were published by authors who were

well-known in the field of health care and had extensive professional experience.

To ensure that the chosen sources of information were relevant to the topic, I confirmed

that they contained accepted facts and opinions on issues relating to patient safety and quality

care. I also checked whether each information source had a clearly defined purpose and

contained pertinent information about patient safety and quality care.

Annotated Bibliography

Kronick, R., Arnold, S., & Brady, J. (2016, August 2). Improving safety for hospitalized patients:

Much progress but many challenges remain. The JAMA Network, 316(5), 489–490.

https://jamanetwork-com.library.capella.edu/journals/jama/fullarticle/2528945 This

article provides a viewpoint on the progress that hospitals have made toward reducing

patient harm and understand the factors that have led to this progress. The authors cite

reports released by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the

National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) to analyze the occurrence of issues relating

to patient safety in hospitals. The authors hypothesize that improvement in health care

safety for hospitalized patients may have been possible because of reasons such as an

awareness of the importance of improving safety culture with evidence-based

suggestions. The authors conclude by expressing the need for finding ways to maintain or

accelerate the rate of decline in adverse events relating to patient harm. They believe that

investing in patient safety research programs and ensuring that patient safety remains a

high priority for hospital leadership teams can help reduce the number of adverse events.

This article is relevant to patient safety because it examines evidence of reduction in

patient harms in hospitals and offers approaches to reduce such harms.

Morris, S., Otto, N. C., & Golemboski, K. (2013). Improving patient safety and healthcare

quality in the 21st century—Competencies required of future medical laboratory science

practitioners. Clinical Laboratory Science, 26(4), 200–204. https://search-

proquestcom.library.capella.edu/docview/1530677721/fulltextPDF/CF6F9C5B900402CP

Q/1?acc ountid=27965

In this article, the authors express their concern about health care professionals,

particularly medical laboratory science (MLS) practitioners, being insufficiently trained

to achieve the five core competencies that the Institute of Medicine (IOM) identified in

2002. The authors discuss ways to incorporate patient safety practices and concepts in the

MLS curricula to ensure that future MLS practitioners are well-versed in the

abovementioned competencies identified by the IOM. The authors conclude that by

focusing on the aims and competencies identified by the IOM, future practitioners will be

better equipped to deal with patient safety concerns while practicing MLS. This article

was chosen because it offers a solution for dealing with patient safety issues and explains

how patient safety concepts can be incorporated in the curricula for courses pertaining to

health care, such as MLS, to enable future health care practitioners to provide effective

health care.

Parand, A., Dopson, S., Renz, A., & Vincent, C. (2014). The role of hospital managers in quality

and patient safety: A systematic review. BMJ Open, 4(9). http://dx.doi.org/

10.1136/bmjopen-2014-005055

This article provides a systematic review of available empirical literature to understand

how health care managers are involved in delivering quality health care and ensuring

patient safety. Based on the literature review, the authors suggest that board-level

managers should spend more than 25% of their time on patient safety and quality to

ensure positive outcomes; however, most of the reviewed studies indicate that they spend

much less time than that. The authors also present a quality management input process

output (IPO) model, a framework that will help managers function effectively and

achieve health care quality and safety. The authors conclude that there is a need to make

certain changes in hospitals to ensure the active involvement of managers in quality

improvement. The article is relevant to patient safety because it discusses the role of

health care managers in influencing patient safety and quality care outcomes and also

proposes a model to help managers understand this role.

Ulrich, B., & Kear, T. (2014). Patient safety and patient safety culture: Foundations of excellent

health care delivery. Nephrology Nursing Journal, 41(5), 447–456, 505.

https://searchproquestcom.library.capella.edu/docview/1617932572/fulltextPDF/1486CC

30B3624B3CPQ/1?ac countid=27965

This article provides a general understanding of the concepts of patient safety and patient

safety culture. The authors explain that the health care system is complex and patient

safety is the responsibility of every individual in a health care organization. They discuss

some tools that can be used to measure patient safety culture, for example, the Safety

Attitudes Questionnaire and the Patient Safety Culture Improvement Tool. They also

examine several strategies to encourage a patient safety culture, such as ensuring that

patient safety is given as much importance as other core business functions. This article

was chosen because it offers strategies for preventing adverse events relating to patient

safety and emphasizes the importance of teamwork within a health care organization to

ensure safe patient care.

Learnings from the Research

I gathered important facts and scholarly opinions about patient safety by going through

peer-reviewed journal articles. This research enriched my knowledge about patient safety. For

example, after reading the article on improving safety for hospitalized patients by Kronick et al.

(2016), I learned about patient harms (such as catheter-associated urinary tract infections and

pressure ulcers) that I was unaware of before this research. Further, by creating an annotated

bibliography, I was able to build a repository of scholarly resources relating to patient safety.

This will make it easier for me to choose relevant resources while writing the paper on issues

concerning patient safety.

References