Risk and Quality Management Assessment Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Risk and Quality Management Assessment - Essay Example Hospitals usually contain specialized personnel and equipment that need a lot of training and experience. Apart from their treatment services, they also provide rooms and beds for patients and always have emergency and trauma sections. Discussion Quality management is basically about the patients’ confidence whereas risk management is about patients’ needs and priorities, and protection of hazards. Quality management puts more focus on the effectiveness of results and efficiency in utilizing the resources whereas risk management is more focused on the potential effectiveness of results and potential efficiency to utilize resources. Patients’ safety is generally very important to both the patients and the authorities (Joshi, 2009). This is why governments and medical practitioners including other professionals have launched a lot of researches to assess the severity, occurrence and reasons behind many adverse events. Ways to enhance safety and reduce risks in heal th organizations through quality and risk management range from good coordination, human resources, good communication, updated information technology, standardization and improvements of the health organization. ... These include wound infections, wrong site surgeries and medication errors. There is therefore a relatively high risk of unsafe situations in hospitals and thus calls for measures to prevent them through quality and risk management (Kavaler, 2012). Hospitals should have flexible, participative and customer focused administrations. They should also possess values that are associated with participation, affiliation and teamwork in each and every improvement to make the quality if the services given better. There should also be a developmental culture based on risk-taking innovations that are supposed to improve the overall services of the hospital. Therefore the idea is to improve the institution while keeping the patients and the staff out of hazards that may be brought about by errors and other causes in the hospital. The key concept of quality management in the hospital is the development of the systems to prevent hazards, and of risk management is the process of minimizing risk by developing the systems to identify and analyze potential hazards (Lighter and Fair, 2004). Risk management, being an on going activity, should not only be about identifying the risks upfront and then forging ahead regardless. It plays a critical role in identifying, managing and containing risks related to patients’ safety. In a hospital environment, communication and good governance together with a systematic and an integrative approach will make risk management easy and adjustable according to the size of the organization. The steps followed in risk management start with a risk strategy which is basically the establishment of the internal and external risk management context and defining its structure. The second step is risk identification