Patient and Medical Staff Safety and Healthy Work Environment in the 21st Century

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About this Research Topic

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Background

Patient safety is a top priority for the global healthcare system and a prerequisite for high-quality medical and nursing care. Ensuring the safety of patients and medical staff is very difficult all over the world, regardless of the healthcare system model that is in place. The number of adverse events that occur during the provision of medical services, and the associated costs are enormous. World Health Organization reports that each year in low and middle-income countries there are approximately 134 million adverse events that result in failure to ensure safety in healthcare entities.

The provision of medical services depends on the involvement of many stakeholders of various medical profession, methods of financing, infrastructure, applied medical technologies, and a level of safety culture in the implementation of numerous processes, including nursing, diagnostic, and therapeutic interventions. It is crucial to assure continuing safety training and optimizing the training modules and evaluation methods which will maximize the effectiveness of safety training. Medical personnel shortages, an ageing workforce, the decreasing number of new graduates and the increasing migration of young people are important factors associated with the hospital safety climate in Central European countries. Shortage of medical personal, with huge influence on nursing profession can lead to missed nursing care affects patient safety and education of nursing students. Incorporating practical training modules into curricula, establishing preceptorship programs, and incorporating ethics education into clinical practice are crucial to address missed nursing care. Health policies should focus on protecting the worker, so in addition to improving working conditions, it would be interesting to promote coping skills to improve the quality of care and patient safety. Managers should focus on how to empower medical personnel to foster a no-blame culture and effective reporting. In whole process of patient safety assurance patient must be included, due to the fact that patients provide a unique, irreplaceable, and essential perspective in evaluating patient safety. Without safe environment for medical personal we can not assure adequate safety for patients. At the first place should be safety of health care workers.

Sub-topics of possible interest include but are not limited to:
• New management and leadership roles in healthcare system;
• The culture of safety, teamwork, standardization of care;
• AI and other technologies to support medical personnel;
• New teaching techniques to assure healthy work environment;
• Missed nursing care and assuring patient safety;
• Healthy work environment in 21st century;
• Health care workers safety for overall patient safety.

Research Topic Research topic image

Keywords: occupational health, safety, healthcare, medical personnel, patient safety

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