Reducing Medical Errors Through Efficient Collaboration

Abstract

Reducing medical errors represents a major challenge for today’s health care system; it requires efficient collaboration among various players to prevent errors and identify problems and their causes early on (Scharein & Trendelenburg, 2013). These individuals are diverse and depend on the tasks involved, but they include administration, secretaries, and records staff. This piece presents the main findings of the study “Enhancing Collaborative Efficiency in Health-Care Administration, Secretarial, and Records Services for Medical-Error Prevention,” which seeks to improve collaboration among these three functional groups. It addresses the administrative and clerical roles specifically, reflecting the user’s preference. The study highlights the benefits of a multi-pronged team approach and other organizational best practices to enhance collaboration, with the goal of reducing medical errors. These errors, which are any preventable adverse events that cause harm to patients, have long been recognized as a major threat to patient safety. They include wrong-site surgeries, wrong prescriptions, and incorrect medication or dosage. Both to prevent them and to ensure timely corrective actions, collaboration among health-care personnel—especially the administrative and clerical teams discussed in this article—must be efficient.
Reducing medical errors remains an international concern due to the relatively high incidence of medical injury and preventable death. Electronic critical-incident reporting systems are used increasingly in hospitals, especially in anesthesia. Hospitals often use systematic logbooks separately for each clinical subdepartment in large institutions, but the participation rate is low due to the considerable workload. Critical incidents related to treatment and safety have been analyzed mostly in response to large events. Assessment by the Committee on Quality and Patient Safety provides routine, independent, multidisciplinary analysis. The highest monodisciplinary group participation rates are achieved from housekeeping departments and anesthesiology, followed by the key groups of nursing and medical staff. Medication problems, vessel and line problems, and faulty equipment constitute 50% of the error reports, with communication and diagnostic errors occurring less frequently.