The Health Organization Risk Management Program Discussion

The Health Organization Risk Management Program Discussion

The purpose of this assignment is to gain real-world insight into how risk management programs operate within health care organizations. Select a local health care organization where you can conduct an interview with an employee who is involved in risk management processes. This organization can be your current employer or a different health care facility in your community. The Health Organization Risk Management Program Discussion

ORDER A PLAGIARISM-FREE PAPER HERE

Acute care, urgent care, large multi‐provider private medical clinics, assisted living facilities, and community/public health clinical facilities are all ideal options to complete the requirements of this assignment. Select an individual who can provide sufficient information regarding how their organization manages risk within its facility to answer the questions below. In your interview, address the following: Risk management strategies used in the organization’s risk control program, along with specific examples. How the facility’s educational risk management program addresses key professional, legal, and ethical issues, such as prevention of negligence, malpractice litigation, and vicarious liability. Policies the facility has implemented that address how to manage emergency triage in high‐risk areas of health care service delivery (e.g., narcotics inventories, declared pregnancy policies, blood-borne disease sector, etc.). Challenges the organization faces in managing and controlling high-risk health care (e.g., infectious diseases, nuclear medicine, abortion, class 4 narcotics/opioids, etc.)The Health Organization Risk Management Program Discussion.

Strategies the facility utilizes to monitor, evaluate, and maintain compliance within its risk management program. After conducting the interview, compose a 750‐1,000 word summary analysis of the interview that includes the questions above, in conjunction with the interviewee’s responses. In addition, include the following elements in your response: An assessment of the organization’s risk management program, including how it attends to high-risk health care and legal concerns. Action steps you would take to improve one area of the organization’s risk management program, along with your rationale for doing so. Cite appropriate references as needed to support your statements and rationale. Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center. An abstract is not required. This assignment uses a rubric. Please review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the expectations for successful completion. You are required to submit this assignment to LopesWrite. A link to the LopesWrite technical support articles is located in Class Resources if you need assistance.

I work in Inova Fairfax Trauma Center. For my interview, I contacted a nurse colleague from the Inova Schar Cancer institute, who provided insight into how their facility’s risk management program operates. A summary analysis of responses to interview questions is outlined below The Health Organization Risk Management Program Discussion

Q1. Risk management strategies used in the risk control program of Inova Schar Cancer Institute

The risk management strategies employed in the organization entail avoidance, reduction, transfer and sharing. Risk avoidance involves putting measures in place to keep the undesired event from occurring. An example is use of safes with biometric security systems to ensure only authorised personnel have access to potentially hazardous materials such as chemotherapy medication and radioactive isotopes used in imaging (Patterson et al, 2018). This is done to protect the larger community from harm and protect the interests of the facility with regard to compliance standards for such materials.

ORDER TODAY

Risk transfer is achieved, for instance, by using insurance providers and by outsourcing specific services to external organizations. Still on cancer treatments, the facility has insurance to offload the burden of costs in the event the slim probability of contamination or undue exposure to such materials occurs. Insurance providers are also instrumental in sharing risk where they bear some of the burden while the rest is borne by the facility. In the respondent’s assessment, the bulk of risk management strategies fall under prevention and reduction, in essence trying to respond to the concerns of how to avoid the occurrence of a specific risk, and if it occurs, how to halt its progress and control negative effects (Hopkin, 2018)The Health Organization Risk Management Program Discussion.

Q2. How the facility’s educational risk management program addresses professional, legal and ethical issues

The facility’s educational program is geared towards cultivating a reporting culture and firm understanding of the organization’s policies on risk management. The respondent believes the organization has appropriate systems in place to hedge the risks of liability for negligence and malpractice. Physicians and nurses must be educationally qualified, registered by the governing body and be members of their respective unions such as the American Nurses Association. Vicarious liability is a legal matter where the superior is held liable for the damaging actions of the subordinate, in this case the hospital for the actions of nurses and doctors (Hopkin, 2018). The educational program clarifies that healthcare workers in the hospital shall only undertake activities under the scope of their employment agreement unless expressly requested via writing (for example, COVID-19 vaccinations)The Health Organization Risk Management Program Discussion. Otherwise, in cases where healthcare workers provide services outside the facility or entirely for personal benefit, the hospital bears no liability.

Related to vicarious liability is the concept of vicarious traumatization, which healthcare workers can suffer from as a result of exposure to trauma and the harrowing impact of cancer on patients (Patterson et al, 2018). For this, the facility has put together staff support groups and provided unlimited health insurance for psychological support. A risk management program is only as effective as those implementing it, and they need to be in optimal physical and emotional state to do so. Protecting patient confidentiality, addressing staff issues and having practical competency are also highlighted for their role in risk management.

Q3. Policies to manage emergency triage in high risk areas of service delivery

Emergency triage is essentially done when proper acute care cannot be provided due to factors such as urgency and distance to care setting. The facility’s policy is to halt the progression of the risk event, isolate the event and those in need of care, prioritize care service provision, and finally undertake emergency triage. To effectively manage emergency triage, the facility requires staff to utilize triage algorithms to evaluate risk, patients’ condition, co-morbidities and type of risk event they were exposed to in order to prioritize and determine type of care to provide (Patterson et al, 2018)The Health Organization Risk Management Program Discussion.

Triage algorithms use vital signs, routine biomarkers and principal complaints to rank care needs. According to the respondent, the adaptive triage algorithm (ADAPT) is one that is extensively used in the facility. The policies are particularly helpful in high risk areas such as emergency department, critical care unit, operating rooms, post-anaesthesia care unit, isolation rooms, laboratories and sterile materials storage. There are policies unique to each high risk area due to the activities done there. Care practitioners are required to be cognizant of the policies. Requesting for assistance from colleagues to undertake emergency triage is encouraged and the incident be reported to the supervisor and the unit head.

Q4. Challenges faced in managing and controlling high risk healthcare

The four dimensions of managing risk are identification, evaluation, assessment and response (McGowan et al,2022). This is true of high risk healthcare as it is of any field. According to the respondent, the challenges encountered in managing high risk healthcare have to do with uncertainty, recognition, clarity (how well the risk is understood) and effective action. Risks in healthcare are controlled by elimination, substitution, engineering controls (isolating risk), administrative control (how people work), and personal protective equipment (Lambrecht, 2021)The Health Organization Risk Management Program Discussion. These are mentioned in order of breadth of execution with elimination yielding the broadest control of risk and personal protection the narrowest. Challenges with broad methods such as elimination and substitution are the vast costs and general consensus required from patients and care providers. This is very problematic and hard to achieve even with government mandates. A case in point is COVID-19 vaccinations and mask wearing as recently experienced. On the narrower end, there are financial costs borne by individual organizations, behavioural inertia and reduced range of activities one can engage in.

Q5. Strategies to monitor, evaluate and maintain compliance with risk management program.

The strategies that the facility uses for monitoring, evaluating and maintaining compliance to its risk management program are supervision, a culture of reporting and transparency, periodic reviews of staff credentials, and training. Supervision helps to monitor compliance and gain early awareness of gaps in risk management (McGowan et al, 2022). The organization cultivates a culture of reporting and has room for anonymous reports. This serves to promote transparency and prevent cases of malpractice and negligence.  Reviewing staff credentials ensures they are competent and legally allowed to undertake specific clinical processes. It also helps to avoid and dismiss staff with professional, legal and ethical issues. Finally, training keeps staff up-to-date with the facility’s risk management program and imparts new skills on risk avoidance and reduction especially with the introduction of new cancer treatments.

Response

1. My Assessment of The Risk Management Program

In my thinking, Inova Schar Cancer Institute has a comprehensive risk management program that effectively protects patient safety, healthcare workers’ welfare, and complies with legal and professional standards. Using engineering controls to limit access to potentially dangerous materials, use of personal protective gear, training and verifying practitioners’ qualifications help manage the human dimension of risk (Hopkin, 2018)The Health Organization Risk Management Program Discussion. Transferring and sharing liability with insurance providers is an astute way of mitigating the impacts of risk events. In terms of managing high risk care services, I think the risk program performs adequately in that systems are in place to halt and isolate risk events, and staff trained to manage emergency triage in their respective units.

1. Area of Improvement in The Organization’s Risk Management Program

Inova Schar Cancer Institute can add patient navigation assistance to their risk management program. Cancer itself and its treatments take a huge toll on the human body to the extent that some patients balk from standard treatments and seek unconventional alternatives (Frenkel et al, 2015). I think introducing patient navigation assistance to the continuum of care including survivorship and palliative care can improve the quality of service and mitigate risk of malpractice. Doing this will require:

1. Study on sustainability and scalability of patient navigation assistance
2. If the study yields positive results, determining the human, financial and infrastructural needs of such an intervention.

• Creating an implementation plan.

1. Implementing a patient navigation plan and reviewing its success as a risk mitigation tool. The Health Organization Risk Management Program Discussion

References

Frenkel, M., Gross, S., Giveon, A. P., Sapire, K., & Hermoni, D. (2015). Living outliers:

experiences, insights and narratives of exceptional survivors of incurable cancer. Future Oncology, 11(12), 1741-1749.

Hopkin, P. (2018). Fundamentals of risk management: understanding, evaluating and

implementing effective risk management. Kogan Page Publishers.

Lambrecht, K. (2021). Tracking the differentiation of risk: The impact of subject framing in

CDC communication regarding covid-19. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 35(1), 94-100.

ORDER NOW

McGowan, J., Wojahn, A., & Nicolini, J. R. (2022). Risk management event evaluation and

responsibilities. In StatPearls [Internet]. StatPearls Publishing.

Patterson, P. D., Higgins, J. S., Van Dongen, H. P., Buysse, D. J., Thackery, R. W., Kupas,

101. F., & Martin-Gill, C. (2018). Evidence-based guidelines for fatigue risk management in emergency medical services. Prehospital emergency care, 22(sup1), 89-101 The Health Organization Risk Management Program Discussion