Effective Strategies for Risk Management in Healthcare
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Strategic Decision Making in Health Care
The risk and liability assessment in a health care organization is very important because, it shows a health care’s risk management support and the safety of the patients, it offers responsibilities and authorities for enacting the assessment plans and lastly, it gives the purpose consistency within the given organization. Statement of purpose, objectives and goals, monitoring and improvement, responsibility and authority for implementation, committee and administrative structures and scope and functions are the major elements of risk and liability assessment. The main goals and objectives of this plan is to; improve the safety of every patient, prevent and reduce harm, errors and system breakdowns, ensure the protection of organizational resources and to reduce liability losses and clinical risks. The scope and functions ensure that; specific places and areas with very high effects on safety and risks are noted down, the functions and responsibilities of risk managements are clearly described and every functional area and entire operation are spanned by the risk management (ECRI, 2011).
Risk managers can be described as those individuals who have undergone trainings on how to handle different issues in various settings. These professionals work majorly under different areas of the medical administration. These might include; emergency readiness, clinical researches, management of events and incidents, human and psychological healthcare and claims of management, financing and insurance. On the other hand, the healthcare managers help in identifying and the evaluation of various risks as a way of injury reduction in patients, the members of staff and the visitors who come in the organization. Risk managers work very hard to either prevent the incidents or to limit the damages that occur after the event. Therefore, the healthcare managers and the risk managers should work hand in hand to reduce the risks that may affect the lives of the patients.
Taking a good look at the information from other sources and previous researches, managers are required to perform organization-specific analyses of risks so that potential risks could be indicated. These analyses are expected to identify various factors like; the type of risks that could take place, measuring the chances of a risk to happen, how severe the result can be if at all the risk occurred, the actions to be taken to limit the effects of the happening, how the likelihood of something to happen can be mitigated and finally the various things that can and those that cannot be avoided. By analyzing the results, risk managers can take a look at likelihood of various events and their effects not forgetting the risks involved. With this analysis, the managers can then come up with the plans for appropriately handling risks.
The health care managers can also maintain compliance and prevent litigation by keeping supervision and making sure that expired prescriptions are not filled up. When patients are sent enough prescription expiration notifications, the communication between patients and the doctors will be supported and hence the reduction of medication abuse. Managers can also help by following up on test results that go missing. The development of a proper plan to monitor and control these test result receipts give an assurance that the results have been reviewed and patients can be consulted. Managers can help in the prevention of immobility and falls. They need to make little modifications to bed rails, toilets and bathtubs that do not have grab bars, the lightings of the organization and keeping check of the ground conditions in order to limit the risks of these hazards.
Every health care organization requires people who can help them in the development, the management and the implementation of a very effective healthcare compliance program. The individual who ensures that the healthcare compliance program is always kept in the current is the chief compliance officer. These include every procedure and policy that is considered as a part of the program. In larger healthcare organizations, this cannot be a one man job. It will therefore need many people and a full house department devoted to these healthcares. Healthcare organizations are expected to also obey the regulations that rely on non-healthcare businesses like the even employment opportunities and the safety of occupations and health administrations (Michael, 2017).
The strategies to minimize liability may include; permitting the healthcare researchers to access claims of liability. This will help in early identification of trends that can be described as problematic in the healthcare. The analyses of these cases have shown cases of the injuries in patients and it has been considered as the one way where the systems of medical liabilities have assisted in improvement in the health care. Offering researchers dwelling on patient safety with open claims access has improved efforts focused on identifying patterns in organizations and has enabled the designing of appropriate safety methods. The second strategy is the encouragement of appropriate adherences to clinical guidelines in order to improve quality and help in liability risk reduction. This method has been known for long to be an effective way in the quality improvement, variation reduction and financial performance improvement. A study has shown that, adherence to these guidelines can have a very effective role in the reduction of legal risks (Ransom et al., 2013).
The legal aspects of a common healthcare facility may include; the whistleblower and false claim suits, lawsuits against the mandate to get health insurance, antitrust issues and ACOs, effects of Stark law on the physician-hospital relations, compliance requirements for hospital exemption from tax and co-management arrangements. The co-management arrangements where the hospital pays the physicians to attain duties and meet objectives is a way the hospital creates an alignment with the doctors. There should be clear definitions of responsibilities and it should not include goals that are easy to attain like arriving on time. Under Stark law, a physician is not allowed to refer his patient for some services in order to get a reimbursement by federal healthcare program in a case where the physician has compensation arrangements.
The first litigation risk faced by a healthcare is the complexity of the given care. This type of care defines care with a lot of problems. Most errors here are routine based and are a result of concentration loss. If the public would accept more errors from complex cares, then care complexity can act as malpractice mitigation and the physician’s failure. Secondly, personalized responsibility is another factor. This indicates that task responsibilities belong to a person instead of it being dispersed or shared. The last factor here is the refusal of the hospital on the appearance of their nurses, physicians and any staff member as a witness. They would rather protect their personnel. In most cases, the hospital only withdraws its support from the staff if only he behaved in a reckless manner (Classen et al., 2011).
The styles of leadership in these organizations have effects on the daily performances and not only personal behaviors. The influence of transformational and transactional leadership has been measured and concluded that it is the degree of attainment of goals and the reflection of the nursing care quality that has been provided. Transactional leadership majorly concentrates on offering everyday care; on the other hand, transformational leadership major deals with the processes that offer motivation to followers to act on their maximum potential by offering change and giving a sense of direction. Jooste (2014) says that, the leaders of the nurses’ function at each and every level. The leadership functions have changed a great deal. Boundaries which are there between the lower, upper and middle leaders are blurring, and the different responsibilities are increasing their flexibility. He further adds that, there is a decentralization of responsibility trend and authority coming from the upper levels to lower ones of healthcare organizations.
As a manager, I would conduct interviews with the help of questionnaires and surveys to understand the attitude of nurses and their perceptions towards the styles of leadership. I would also perform personality tests in order to see traits that correlate with the various leadership skills so that I can understand the workforce’s weaknesses and strengths. As a manager and a leader, I would offer transformational and transactional educations, trainings and analysis in order to make my nursing stuff suitable for crisis handling. I would also form a disaster management team that will have quality knowledge on leadership styles (Jooste, 2014).
References
Classen D., Resar R., Griffin F., et al., (2011). “Global trigger tool” shows that adverse events in hospitals may be ten times greater than previously measured. Health Aff.
ECRI Institute, (2011). Developing a risk management plan. A step by step approach. Retrievd March 24th & 25th.
Jooste H., (2014). The applications to the wider health and social contexts. The Oxford Press.
Michael S., (2017). An overview of the basics for organizations and providers. The Florida health law.
Ransom J., Scott R., Studdert Q., et al., (2013). Reduced medicolegal risk by compliance with abstetric clinical pathways. A case control study.