Select a problem that you have experienced or identified within your workplace or in a health care setting. What steps would you take to address the problem?
Discussion 3-2: Clinical Practice Problem
Contemporary healthcare organizations view information technology as a solution to technical work that they often experience during the healthcare delivery process. However, this was not the case in one medical facility I once worked for. A problem that was experienced in the healthcare setting involved the use of information technology for electronic ordering of blood-related tests. There was a confusion in the test orders, especially when more than one physician ordered blood tests at the same time. Although every order placed had a unique identification number, the nurse who was collecting the hard copy of the orders at the printer terminal could not know the doctor who placed the orders. As a result, the nurse most of the time, ended up conducting blood tests on wrong patients. The tests had to be re-ordered and redone before the doctors could analyze the results to identify the patients’ problems. This did not only expose the patients to the risk of receiving incorrect treatment but it was also costly to the organization due to wastage of resources (Da Silva & Krishnamurthy, 2016). Nurses should always take action to address clinical practice problems in their places of work.
The best way to address the problem described above is to identify its origin and work with relevant stakeholders in the facility to eliminate it. The steps that would be taken include; sharing the problem with the unit manager, reviewing the procedure used to make orders, identifying the actual cause of the current confusion, and implementing appropriate interventions to correct the problem (Afaya et al., 2021). The problem experienced at the practice setting occurred as a result of all doctors making orders from different terminals but the orders were being collected from one printer by a different person who did not place the orders. A resolution was made to completely remove paper forms from electronic ordering. All electronic orders were sent to one computer in the pathology laboratory from where they were accessed by the laboratory technician. This helped to address the mix-up.
References
Afaya, A., Konlan, K. D., & Kim Do, H. (2021). Improving patient safety through identifying barriers to reporting medication administration errors among nurses: an integrative review. BMC Health Services Research, 21(1), 1156. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-021-07187-5
Da Silva, B. A., & Krishnamurthy, M. (2016). The alarming reality of medication error: a patient case and review of Pennsylvania and National data. Journal of Community Hospital Internal Medicine Perspectives, 6(4), 31758. https://doi.org/10.3402/jchimp.v6.31758