2016 Volume 17 Issue 1 Pages 22-27
In order to increase medical staff self-awareness regarding medical errors at the individual level, the staff in our hospital was required to review their previously conceived beliefs concerning five key areas of patient safety；“everyone can make mistakes”, “medical staff's viewpoint”, “individual responsibility”, “medical safety”, and “the more reports of medical errors, the better”. Newly emphasized notions are as follows：“everyone can prevent mistakes”, “patients' viewpoint”, “hospital responsibility”, “patient safety”, and “the less reports of medical errors, the better”.
In addition to the change of ideas as mentioned above, the campaign of “Prevention of Administrative Errors” was launched in April, 2012.
After the campaign, the average number of administrative errors fell from 11.8 cases a month to 6.9 cases, an overall 41.5 % reduction. Errors committed between the prescription of medicine and hand-over of these to nurses decreased by 64.2 %. However, the percentage of errors in the process of nurses' preparation and delivery of medicine to patients increased by 14.0 %.
This campaign based on changing some beliefs had a positive effect, but further improvement is needed to satisfy patients' expectation.
Moreover, in order to assure a quality of patient safety, a combination of both strong leadership from the hospital's administration and cooperation from the medical staff is required. There is also the need to further improve the quality of education of medical students regarding patient safety.
