Safe and Quality Healthcare Services Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Safe and Quality Healthcare Services - Essay Example So as we see, FMEA is a precautionary process, which helps prevent problems and help deal with them in an effective and organized manner, if they were to occur. This analytical method has been used since several decades in the production and engineering industry and has proved to be an excellent tool in identifying and reducing hazards. It examines each individual component of a particular system to determine a number of ways in which each component could fail and, not only this, but the effect of a particular failure on the stability of the entire system. (Spath, 2003) One of the major concerns in the healthcare industry is safety. The assurance that a patient is in reliable hands and that the treatment being done or service being offered is safe up to quality standards. For patient safety and wellbeing, healthcare service providers must adopt a set of rules or standards to abide by. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) assumed responsibility for the certification of hospitals in 1951, back then, the standards continued to uphold a safe environment. Because of increasing public concern with the problem of medical errors and patient injuries, JCAHO reinforced its commitment to patient safety. Commencing in 1996, JCAHO introduced a number of new standards that are intended to maintain continuous improvement in the safety of the services provided to the public. (Spath, 2003) In addition to adopting well defined processes used in healthcare services and assuring that the personnel performing the processes are competent, there is a need for more safety and precautionary measures. The solution to this lies in other industries. This is when JCAHO executives considered standard changes to adopt a more a proactive approach to risk reduction, they researched many other techniques to improve safety used in other high-risk industries to find one that would be adaptable to health care services as well. (Spath, 2003) The process So, basically FMEA is a proactive approach and it consumes little time and resources when compared to the return on investments. The National Center for Patient Safety website developed by the Veterans Affair, devised a set of steps applying the traditional FMEA to healthcare. The process is as follows: 1. Choose a process to study. JCAHO requires the