Risk Management Program Analysis Part Two
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
Risk Management Program
The risk management program involved implementing an educational intervention to reduce medication errors in the acute care department of a regional hospital. The program has since been implemented, and the facility is now enjoying better healthcare quality and patient safety standards. The main contributors to the success have been the MIPPA-accreditation body, the facility’s administration, and an inherent dedication among the staff to medical ethics and healthcare excellence.
MIPPA Accreditation
The facility used the Joint Commission to obtain accreditation and evaluate the quality improvement and risk management process. The Joint Commission was formed in 1952 as a non-profit body that collaborates with healthcare providers to enhance health services delivery (Wadhwa & Huynh, 2021). The organization evaluates facilities and motivates the care team towards excellence.
The Joint Commission played a crucial role in implementing the educational program to address medication errors at the hospital. First, it contributed towards establishing trends associated with medication errors. The officers stated that a successful educational program must utilize relevant data to understand the problem needing addressing. Hence, the commission assisted in conducting in-house data collection on staff working hours, morale, medication error events, and patient-caregiver relationships. The information would help determine the key concerns related to risk management and any confounding factors.
After analyzing the data, the Joint Commission personnel were useful in its visualization. They introduced the change agents to the SAFER dashboard, a multi-resource platform for handling data (The Joint Commission, 2021). Data visualization was integral to the entire educational program since the educators relied on charts and other related media to convey critical information on the various contributors to and impacts of medication administration errors.
The Joint Commission has access to implementation data for all healthcare providers it evaluates. Its commissioners shared the information with the educators and the staff to compare their pre-intervention performance. The data showed that some other facilities were initially worse than ours. However, through the commission’s involvement, they become centers of healthcare excellence. Thus, the information motivated the team to develop systems and practices that eradicate medication errors.
Finally, the Joint Commission’s officers assisted in collecting performance data. They helped the change agents and educators store accurate records of the intervention process and their findings. Therefore, they rendered external credibility to the change process while also training the personnel on ways to conduct successful educational interventions. Moreover, the performance metrics helped evaluate the program’s overall success by comparing the pre-and post-intervention metrics.
The Role of Various Administrative Levels
The facility has three critical administrative levels: the board, department manager, and team leaders. The board’s main role was authorization and oversight while the acute care department manager coordinated the in-service training program to ensure normal service delivery remained. Meanwhile, team leaders mobilized their members to ensure they participated and benefitted from the program. However, the functions of the three administrative categories also involved upholding ethics, establishing and sustaining the risk management strategies operational policies.
Ethics
The board laid out the ethical requirements for the procedure. For instance, they determined that the change agents and the Joint Commission Officers had to uphold patient and caregiver privacy when collecting, analyzing, and presenting information on past medication error events. There were also other ethical guidelines on participation consent, withdrawal, and purpose (Hall et al., 2020). The department manager would directly oversee the risk management procedure to ensure that the educational team upheld these ethical standards. Finally, team leaders ensured that they kept the change agents in check by collecting and presenting any concerns of ethical infringement or concerns to the hospital’s hierarchy.
Risk Management Strategies and Operational Policies
All three administrative levels were vital to establishing and sustaining new risk management strategies per the educational program. One of the key issues arising from the program was the need for safer medication storage. Thus, the board helped establish the new strategy by funding the installation of a computer-aided drug storage facility to ensure that the drugs were in optimal conditions. The board also created a policy on the use of electronic checklists. Nurses would have to complete the list before retrieving medicine (Mekonnen et al., 2016). The procedure would ensure that type and dosage of medicine that the nurse wanted to administer to a particular patient is what was recommended by the physician and is safe for them.
The department manager and team leaders ensured that all staff members complied with the new policies and strategies. They would identify challenges in enforcing the new work routines and develop appropriate solutions. For instance, there was an initial challenge of drug administration during emergencies. Therefore, they recommended that there be an emergency provision for drug administration which required fewer checks. The system could only raise an alert if there were a declared counteraction with specific substances in the medication that the caregiver wants to administer. Thus, through collaboration, the manager, team leaders, and staff established safer yet effective medication administration strategies and policies.
