Patient Safety, Prevention of Medical Errors, and Risk Management
In today’s fast paced society, it becomes more difficult to manage all the responsibilities
individuals have in their careers while also managing their personal life. Requirements on
employees rises, creating greater stress on the individual which is depicted by the demandcontrol job model that outlines the difference between increasing demands and time pressures
in the workplace compared to decreasing level of control over decisions.1 This is prevalent in all
fields of work but becomes a greater danger when people’s health and livelihood is at stake. In
the healthcare industry, employees also face this dilemma where their attention is divided
between providing the best care possible and simultaneously preventing medical errors.
The gaps that exist in the healthcare industry are the compilation of a multitude of
factors. Studies have put forth that about 37.9% of physicians experience burnout at any point
in time compared to 27.8% of the general population, which leads to a decline in cognitive
performance, judgement imbalance, and flat affect, affecting the care delivered to patients.1
These contributing elements leads to errors of omissions secondary to actions that are not
taken, or errors of commission related to incorrect actions. Thus, hospital systems have
standardized protocols on having decisions go through double or triple checking to reduce
errors, verifying drug labels, pop-up alerts when a value is out of normal range, and many other
parameters.3 However, regardless of these protocols that aim at improving patient safety, a key
factor that is missing is addressing the need for an adequate quantity of employees.