Patient Risk Mitigation

Any Indian hospital can easily adopt the Japanese KYT proactive risk assessment programme.

- Deepak Agarkhed

An OT housekeeping staff got accidental needle stick injury from the needle used on patient while sorting out the waste bin after surgery. The hemodialysis process of patient was about to start with another patient’s dialyser and same was noticed by a technician just before the dialysis. The incidents mentioned are a few examples of risks that hospital staff or patient has gone through while in a hospital.

The major reasons for repeated incident in hospital are non-standardisation of processes, lack of mechanism to review current process including gaps and no lessons learnt from previous incidents ranging from ‘near miss’ to sentinel events. The patient care pathway in most of the hospitals are not standardised and practiced. The input variables to patient care process includes patients, skilled to unskilled healthcare staff, medications, medical equipment, etc. The gaps in process may happen on account of any of these or combination of these variables. In any hospital, hazards can happen to patients and healthcare staff whenever potential risks are not been identified and actions are initiated for elimination, substitution or isolation of hazards. The NABH accreditation standard CQI 2 clearly states that patient safety programme should cover risk management consisting of both risk identification and mitigation.