Contribution of Nurses in Patient Safety

Patient safety is one of the main components of quality health services. Patient safety is referred to as preventing and reducing adverse events and injuries to the patient when they are the recipients of health care. It’s important for us to know that proper and safe care is one of the primary rights of patients, and the patient safety index is one of the most important hospital management indicators.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), approximately 10 million people around the world suffer from debilitating injuries or death due to unsafe health care each year. Research shows that almost 10% of inpatients in hospitals are associated with adverse events. 

Worldwide, nurses play a critically important role in ensuring patient safety while providing care directly to patients. While physicians make diagnostic and treatment decisions, they may only spend 30 to 45 minutes a day with even a critically ill hospitalized patient, which limits their ability to see changes in a patient’s condition over time.

However, nurses are a constant presence at the bedside and regularly interact with physicians, pharmacists, families, and all other members of the health care team and are crucial to timely coordination and communication of the patient’s condition to the team. 

Annually, more than eight million deaths in low- and middle-income countries are attributed to poor quality of care. Nurses can contribute to improved quality of care and to patient safety through the prevention of adverse events, but this requires that they work at their optimal capacity, within strong teams, and within a good working environment. 

Nurses play an essential role in ensuring patient safety by monitoring patients for clinical deterioration, detecting errors and near misses, understanding care processes and weaknesses inherent in some systems, and performing numerous other actions to ensure patients receive high-quality care. 

However, burn-out amongst nurses and other healthcare workers due to high workload, longer shifts and working overtime, inadequate equipment, long journeys and ineffective interpersonal relationships has been associated with worsening patient safety, whereas good work environments, adequate staffing of nurses and education in mixed-skill teams are correlated with reduced hospital length of stay, lower incidence of adverse events such as pneumonia, gastritis, upper gastrointestinal bleeds, pressure ulcers, and catheter-associated urinary tract infections, and reduced overall mortality.

Lilian Nuwabaine Luyima; is a BSc Nurse & MSN-Midwife & Women’s’ Health Specialist working with Aga Khan University