Educational Program on Risk Management – Part One: Outline of Topic
The purpose of this assignment is to create an educational program that supports the implementation of risk management strategies in a health care organization.
In this assignment, you will develop an outline for an “in-service” style educational risk management program for employees of a particular health care organization that will then form the basis for a PowerPoint presentation in Topic 5. Select your topic for this educational session from one of the proposed recommendations or changes you suggested in the Risk Management Program Analysis – Part One assignment to enhance, improve, or secure compliance standards in your chosen risk management plan example.
Create a 500-750-word comprehensive outline that communicates the following about your chosen topic:
Introduction: Identify the risk management topic you have chosen to address and why it is important within your health care sector.
Rationale: Illustrate how this risk management strategy is lacking within your selected organization’s current risk management plan and explain how its implementation will better meet local, state, and federal compliance standards.
Support: Provide data that indicate the need for this proposed risk management initiative and demonstrate how it falls under the organization’s legal responsibility to provide a safe health care facility and work environment.
Implementation: Describe the steps to implement the proposed strategy in your selected health care organization.
Challenges: Predict obstacles the health care organization may face in executing this risk management strategy and propose solutions to navigate or preempt these potentially difficult outcomes.
Evaluation: Outline your plan to evaluate the success of the proposed risk management program and how well it meets the organization’s short-term, long-term, and end goals.
Opportunities: Recommend additional risk management improvements in adjacent areas of influence that the organization could or should address moving forward.
You are required to incorporate all instructor feedback from this assignment into Educational Program on Risk Management Part Two †Slide Presentation assignment in Topic 5. To save time later in the course, consider addressing any feedback soon after this assignment has been graded and returned to you. It may be helpful to preview the requirements for the Topic 5 assignment to ensure that your outline addresses all required elements for submission of the final presentation.
You are required to support your statements with a minimum of six citations from appropriate credible sources.
Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center. An abstract is not required.
This assignment uses a rubric. Please review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the expectations for successful completion.
Sample Answer
Educational Program on Risk Management
Medication dispensing and administration errors occur when a healthcare provider gives the wrong medicine to patients. The consequences can be mild, significant, or severe. In the United States, seven to nine thousand people die annually due to medication errors (Tariq et al., 2021). These cases do not only occur in pharmacies but also in more common settings such as acute care. Therefore, establishing ways to reduce medication errors will alleviate the overall risk patients face in the acute care setting of a regional hospital in the United States.
Rationale
The acute care settings of many hospitals experience medication errors due to low health literacy among some staff members. Therefore, they could unknowingly administer the wrong drug or dosage due to misreading the physician’s instructions. Other contributing factors include poor patient-caregiver communication and a lack of systematic tools to reduce medication errors (such as checklists) (AHRQ, 2021). Therefore, the current risk management plans do not account for these shortcomings, putting patients at high risk.
There is an urgent need to address medication-related risks in acute care settings. An educational program would help all stakeholders in the facility become more competent and facilitate the installation of systematic tools to curb the prevalence of medication errors. Hence, the facility will improve its overall patient safety standards to match state and federal regulations.
Support
There are different perspectives on medication errors. Pervanas et al.’s (2016) study established that most errors involved new medications. Furthermore, these errors could include incorrect dispensing, wrong doses, or incorrect directions. A report by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) (2017) shows that 21% of American patients have experienced medication errors, and 31% have seen it happen to someone they know. Such a risk rate is too high, yet most of these instances are preventable through better organizational management. The IHI report further shows that most causes were preventable through more keenness and improved workplace culture. Hence, it is the healthcare facility’s responsibility to address these risks.
Implementation
Implementing the risk management educational program would follow the six-sigma steps (Vijaya & Jiju, 2018). First, the change agent would define the specific issues that require addressing, such as medication literacy levels, patient communication, and improving patient-caregiver relationships. The change agent would then measure those metrics before the intervention and analyze their impact. Next, one would implement the educational program with a keen focus on improvement. Here, the change agent would involve external experts to assist in delivery. A post-education intervention would assess the immediate gain in knowledge. However, the change agent must develop a sustainable and long-term method of ensuring that the caregivers retain the knowledge and implement it.
Challenges
Common obstacles would include reluctant cooperation among caregivers and understaffing during training sessions. One can attempt to address these challenges in various ways. For instance, one can use reinforcement approaches to encourage staff members to change their service delivery approaches (Mills et al., 2019). A strict non-compliance punishment may also be effective. Meanwhile, the change agent should develop a training schedule that causes the least interruptions to service delivery. The facility’s administration can also hire temporary staff to assist where necessary.
Evaluation
A pre-and post-intervention evaluation approach with a three-month follow-up would suffice for the risk management educational program. The post-intervention measure would help address short-term goals such as increased awareness of patient needs and medication literacy. The follow-up would measure the key long-term goal, which is a steady decline in medication error incidents. It would also help the facility develop end goals, such as new workplace culture and routine that limits the risks of medication error occurrence (Pozgar, 2014, p. 340).
Opportunities
The facility’s acute care setting should also address other workplace-related risks such as caregivers’ mental wellness and patient education levels. Caregivers’ mental health impacts their ability to offer risk-free services, while comprehensive patient education lowers the chances of drug or substance interaction. Therefore, addressing both issues would improve overall risk management efficacy.
