Throughout the health-care industry, the failure to correctly identify patients and correlate that information to an intended clinical intervention continues to result in wrong person, wrong site procedures, medication errors, transfusion errors and diagnostic testing errors.
This is a recognised international problem that has been identified as a key patient safety goal or program by all of the major international patient safety agencies including the World Health Organization, National Patient Safety Agency in the UK, Joint Commission International Centre for Patient Safety and National Patient Safety Centre in the USA.
About the Commission's Program
There are many causes of patient identification errors and a wide range of strategies have been proposed to address them. The Commission’s Patient Identification Program includes a number of different initiatives that focus on different aspects of this problem; all aim to reduce errors and improve patient identification processes.The initiatives include:
- A national standard for patient identification bands.
- Enhancing the Ensuring Correct Patient, Correct Site, Correct Procedure Protocol.
- Expanding the use of the Ensuring Correct Patient, Correct Site, Correct Procedure Protocol into other therapeutic areas.
- Improving learning from sentinel events and root cause analyses (RCAs).
- Investigating technological solutions to address patient misidentification.
Resources
- Ensuring correct patient, correct site, correct procedure protocol
- Ensuring Correct Patient, Correct Site, Correct Procedure in Radiology, Nuclear Medicine, Radiation Therapy and Oral Surgery
- Specifications for a standard patient identification band
- Review of Technology Solutions to Patient Misidentification
- Ensuring Correct Patient, Correct Site, Correct Procedure Protocol for Surgery: Review of implementation and proposals for action
Related Links
Contact
Dr Nicola Dunbar, Program Manager(02) 9126 3600
Email: mail@safetyandquality.gov.au
