Every year, World Patient Safety Day is observed worldwide on September 17 in a bid to raise awareness regarding the safety of patients. The World Health Organization aims to encourage individuals to commit their lives towards making healthcare safe and reducing patient harm through this day.
Let’s take this opportunity to understand the five things that your doctor does for your safety that you are not aware of.
- It is an imperative for doctors to keep themselves updated on new drugs, devices, and technologies. “Online platforms for doctors are helping in facilitating the same by connecting clinicians and Health Care Providers (HCPs) digitally to have shared perspectives and peer-to-peer review on the latest developments in the field of medical science and technology. Besides, it is enabling research and interactions on patient safety, facilitating CMEs in the form of webinars,” saysDr Mukesh Parmar, CEO, Docplexus.
- Doctors are also ensuring patient safety through error free diagnosis and preventing infections at healthcare facilities. In addition to this, vaccination of doctors and staff is being considered of prime importance since they are the frontline workers. The use of protective equipment is also being promoted along sterilization of tools and regular disinfection, avoiding any sharp edges in hospitals, proper bio disposal of medical waste.
- Pharmacovigilance is the science and activities relating to the detection, assessment, understanding and prevention of adverse effects or any other medicine/vaccine related problem. “In this direction, doctors are taking steps to ensure accurate drug administration, making use of telemedicine for patient monitoring and reporting complexities. It is helping doctors in handling medical errors better and learning to drive better patient outcomes from peer and experts. This is being done through online access to incident reporting, case studies, online webinars and learning from them, especially in high-risk situations,” adds Parmar.
- Initiatives taken by the doctors or their participation in virtual platforms is helping in providing better counselling to patients for adhering to treatment and limit relapse. This is possible through peer-to-peer interaction on online or digital platforms which help clinicians to counsel patients in a better way.
- Doctors are taking smart steps to meet the medico legal and ethical requirements today. This could be having a female attendant in the room or ward of female patient(s) to documenting surgical steps or medications extensively for better evidence build to even simple things like patient or medical consent that safeguards everyone.
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