Healthcare improvement measures in risk management and patient satisfaction

Healthcare providers have the responsibility and obligation to prevent their employees and patients from exposing under risks in the hospital settings. A suitable risk management not only improves patient safety and healthcare quality but also reduces unnecessary costs, expenditures and staffs’ workload. Dixon-Woods et al. [1] examined whether the hierarchy of controls approach is suitable for use in the healthcare industry. In this study, the well-trained clinical teams from four NHS hospitals in UK classified 42 risk controls based on the concept of HoC. The authors found out that most of the interventions (35 out of 42) were considered as weak action (administrative controls), only little numbers were qualified as strong or intermediate level (substitution or engineering controls). Therefore, the authors suggested that learning risk management from other higher risk industries may be ineffective. However, it is crucial for a healthcare organization to adopt an evidence-based risk identification model or develop their own risk measures, once there is an incidence occurred, we not only have to react to what has happened but also prevent it from happening again proactively.