Quality Health Service Standards

Quality Health Services

After going through the events that took place leading to the death of Antoinette Williams, it is disheartening and calls for legal actions. The hospitalization of the deceased was not from a willing person, but he gets forced. Also, alongside nine other patients, their death is caused by a person who is accidentally trying to perform a legal activity without negligence. In the process, the nine patients get sedated to ensure they calm during the administration of drugs. When the drugs get administered, an inflammation occurs to the heart muscles of the deceased patients. In Australia, the government has some set standards that guide the health sector. The department involved with the standards is known as the National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards. The standard safety organization provides a consistent statement on the level of care customers should expect from the health service organizations. The organization’s standards are under the foundations of the Commission, which closely works with the government of Australia, the states, and territories in the country. Also, the private sector is involved in ensuring the standards are well followed and applied. The most important individuals involved are the clinical experts and the patients. The standard organizations protect the patients from harm, which improves the health service quality offered by the health institutions. There are eight standards involved in the NSQHS standards and are available nationally and outline to what extent customer care patients from the health institutions (Jensen, 2020). This paper only focuses on two of the standards and their applications to the case by Antoinette Williams. The standards are the medication safety standards and the comprehensive care standards.  Therefore, the deaths resulted from the nurses’ failure to follow the set standards by the NSQHS.

The NSQHS contains the comprehensive care standard in the application of health standards. Disparities in safety and quality usually get reported due to the increased failure to apply certain conditions or particular situations or conditions. The loss may also be a form of failure to achieve the targeted results for a specific group of people. The standard focuses on particular issues which are cross-cutting in numerous events. Some of the topics addressed are due to the failure of providing coordinated care which is incessant. Also, the standard focuses on the failure to cooperate with the patients, carers, and family members to identify, assess, and manage the patient’s clinical risks and get out to know the care preferences. The main aim of the standard is to make sure that patients get comprehensive health care under the individual’s needs. Also, the standards are aware of the patient’s health issues, affecting their lives and comfort.r Aiming to ensure the prevention of risks of harm for patients while receiving health care is also under the standards. The chances are therefore well handled and managed through the laid strategies to curb the risks. Some of the dangers prevented include the death of a patient (Rafferty et al., 2018). In the case of Antoinette Williams, it seems the standard is not well followed or considered. If the measure gets considered, it would not have brought or led to the death of Antoinette and his fellow patients.

Through comprehensive care standards, there follows a proper integration of the processes involved with the care of patients. Through the integration, it becomes easier to determine the needs of patients, therefore, preventing harm. In Antoinette and his fellow patients, there lacked a good integration process for their care (Sevin et al., 2018). The lack of integration made the process of risk prevention hard, and therefore the death of the ten occurred.

The Comprehensive Care Standard has several criteria that apply in the execution of its roles. These are the systems that are put in place to ensure clinicians support clinicians in delivering inclusive care. Integration of clinical governance serves as action 5.01. The main intention of the criteria is to make sure that the safety and quality systems support the clinicians in delivering comprehensive care and, in turn, minimizing harm to the patient. The actions involve the performance of risk examination of the people to receive the services and the services provided, therefore making a decision that includes screening and assessment (Lavis et al., 2019). Also, the action involves integrating processes for evaluation and screening, which gets organized—action 5.01 consists of making sure any decisions are made by every person engaged in providing health care. The findings are essential in the planning process, the decision-making process of offering care to end life. Through the action, it is easy to use assessment and screening processes to identify the patients containing needs that may put them at a death risk. Through the processes, the health care providers can supervise the patient and call on for support from other medics. In the case of Antoinette, the medical professionals didn’t consider the risk they were exposing the patients to due to misadventure. Through misadventure, the medical professionals caused the death of the individuals through their involvement in sedation. This shows high levels of lack of negligence. The inflammation of the heart muscles primarily caused their death.

Action 5.02 is the application of quality improvement systems. The quality improvement systems are primarily critical during the support for delivery of comprehensive care, thus reducing harm to the patient. Action 5.02 complies with the data collection that gets launched earlier, action 5.01. The action involves the follow-up of the admission of the patient and the period by which the patient is discharged, the periodical circumnavigation, multidisciplinary team rounds, and the meetings held by the management of the health facility. Also, the action plays a significant role in determining the results from the stay of a patient in the hospital and the alignment of the patient data, which gets documented with genuine care and the patient’s experience—the documentation considering the standards and the adverse events of the patients. The action also contains surveys of the attitudes of the patient and their experiences they counter while the medics exercise the comprehensive care system.

The case presented sees the unaccountability of the doctors handling the medical circumstances of the ten. They didn’t have a good record of the patients. The lack of a good record kept the medics away from familiarizing themselves with the patients’ conditions. Also, they couldn’t receive feedback on the effects the application of comprehensive care had on the patients. Due to the lack of feedback, they are not aware of the consequences of applying comprehensive care services (Moor, 2020). It would be easier for them to recognize areas that needed improvement during comprehensive care services. The results obtained from the risk evaluations are essential in realizing hints or gaps. They plan and set goals and priorities for the areas to get investigated or regions requiring actions. In the place where opposing events occur, the best way is to investigate to identify any issues affecting the performance or the use of the comprehensive care system.

Moreover, actions 5.05 and 5.06 emphasize collaboration as a team. From the action, the people involved and expected to take part in multidisciplinary activities and teamwork. Also, everyone involved is expected to understand their roles and every person working as a clinician in any team. Through collaboration and cooperation, the clinicians get expected to deliver high-quality, comprehensive care which is safe and continuous while involving good communication and teamwork. They are supposed to ensure they implement the standards as required by the community for a safety standard. The clinicians in the Graylands hospital did contrary to the comprehensive care standard as specified in action 5.05. They did contrary through the lacking communications between themselves. Due to the lack of communication between themselves, there lacked proper coordination and recording of their medical efforts. Also, the clinicians did not give quality services as specified by the standard’s action 5.05 because they failed to provide quality services to the patients. In action 5.06, clinicians get mandated to work together and, through their unity, plan and deliver quality comprehensive care services to the patients. The teamwork gets brought about by the collaboration between clinicians, patients, family members of the patients, and the carers. The action, therefore, presents the primary task to the clinicians. The main mission is for them to ensure they apply an organized process and work together with the patients, the family of the patients, and ensure they deliver high-quality work. There forms an essential baseline to get patient’s information on their condition through collaboration with the patients. Therefore, it is easy to lay down strategies to improve patients’ health conditions (Bielecka, 2017). In the case in the Greylands Hospital, the clinicians do not engage the patients to know how they are faring. Instead, the clinicians inject the patients with sedatives to fall asleep or calm and make it easy for them to treat them, which is wrong. From the observation from the hospital, Greyland’s, the clinicians at the hospital went totally against the Comprehensive Care standards as provided in the NSQHS Standards.

Furthermore, the NSQHS Standards specifies its standards and elaborates the medical safety standard. The medical standards get set to reduce the medical incidents that occur and heal the welfare and eminence of medicines. Since medicines are an essential treatment used in healthcare, there are specific medicines that improve the patient’s health condition, and there are others that cause more harm than the patient was. Due to the everyday use of the medicines, they have many errors associated with their service and other antagonistic events compared to other interventions in health. Some adverse events are more costly in terms of mortality and resources used. The standard is entitled to providing sound governance for the use of medicine that is safe and of high quality (WHO, 2019). Also, the standard lays strategies on ensuring there are fewer incidences related to medicine and the patient’s potentials to get harmed by the medicine. Finally, the standards involve informing the patient about the medicines they get set to use and making personal decisions.

The standards also specify the prescription, dispensation, and administration of medicines. The process of managing medication is complicated thus requires the use of several experienced clinicians. The method of medication involves safety. Safety occurs during the procurement process, supply, storage, manufacturing process, prescription, dispensation, and administration. It becomes easier to identify any potential errors that may harm the patient through the medical safety standards. Also, through the middle, it becomes easy to respond using the strategies to reduce possible errors during the medication. The bar has criteria that provide for the process of management of drugs.

Action 4.13 of the standard introduces the information and decision support tools for medicines. The action ensures enough means to support information and decision-making on the drugs present for the clinicians. Therefore, the provision of information that is up to date and relevant has information on medicines and the tools to support decision-making by the clinical task force (Khalil, 2020). The clinicians are, in turn, expected to maintain medicine-based information containing evidence for effective management of medication. In Greyland Hospital, the clinicians fail to apply the decision-making tools. The decision-making tools are critical because they guide the functionality of certain medicines, helping them make the most important decisions for patient care. In our case, the clinicians do not consider the effects that accompany the administration of the sedatives. The use of sedatives leads to the death of the ten patients through inflammation of the heart muscles.

Conclusively, Greyland Hospital goes against all the standards put in place by the National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards, as discussed by the points above. The Commission has laid standards to be followed by the health institutions. Greyland contradicts the criteria discussed in that they do not have good communication channels with the patients. They do not have enough information about the patients; they combine medicines; for the case of Williams, he gets admitted to the hospital not out of his will. The death of the ten was led by a lack of negligence in the work of the clinicians.