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The 1st Special Operations Medical Group is celebrating National Patient Safety Awareness Week at Hurlburt Field, Florida, March 22-26. The annual celebration allows medical providers to review patient safety practices and encourage patients to voice their needs to improve patient care.
Patient Safety Awareness Week is a health observance sponsored by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. During this week, IHI seeks to advance essential discussions locally and globally and inspire action to improve the health care system’s safety for patients and the workforce.
The theme of this year’s NPSA Week is technology’s role in patient safety. Throughout the week, medical staff will participate in different activities to test their patient safety knowledge.
“The goal of the patient safety awareness week is ultimately to make medical care safer and strive for zero harm to our beneficiaries,” said U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Zeola, the chief of the medical staff of the 1st SOMDG.
Medical personnel will be sent short video clips of different medical scenarios. Members will use the Joint Patient Safety Reporting System to determine whether an event would be classified as a ‘good catch,’ ‘near miss,’ ‘no harm,’ ‘harm,’ or ‘sentinel’ event. These classifications range from an event that is an unsafe situation mitigated through early detection to a patient encountering an event in which permanent harm or even death results from a medical error. All military facilities use the JPSR system for reporting patient safety events.
“These events will be reviewed and eventually invalidated by me because they are just practice,” said ret. Lt. Col. Stephen Sapiera, a contractor for Air Force Medical Service and the Patient Safety Specialist for the 1st SOMDG. “This will help staff who have never used the system or are hesitant to use the system practice using it in a safe environment.”
Another event will be the ‘Room of Errors,’ a day of training with manikins and props in a procedure room where teams of personnel will have two minutes to identify as many errors as possible. These errors can include a gurney’s safety rails being down or unlabeled syringes and medication bottles with past expiration dates. The team with the highest number of errors found will be awarded a grand prize, while all other participants will receive consolation prizes.
“This is a fun exercise for our skilled medics to scan a room and detect potentially hazardous conditions,” Zeola said.
Medical personnel will also be sent quizzes and trivia throughout the week to test their patient safety knowledge.
“Any system with human interaction is inherently prone to human errors, even by the most professional and well-intentioned staff,” said Sapiera. “However, what we can change is the environment in which humans work.”
Although Patient Safety Awareness Week only comes once a year, 1st SOMDG Air Commandos take precautions each day to protect the health of service members, retirees, and their families.
| Date Taken: | 03.22.2021 |
| Date Posted: | 03.29.2021 10:16 |
| Story ID: | 392192 |
| Location: | HURLBURT FIELD, FL, US |
| Web Views: | 41 |
| Downloads: | 3 |
This work, 1 SOMDG recognizes National Patient Safety Awareness Week 2021, by SrA Robyn Hunsinger, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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