Ensuring patient safety is one of the main tasks and responsibilities of the medical staff. The most common patient safety concerns include information security and EHR integration, hygiene and spread of infections, nursing staffing ratios and burnout, antibiotic resistance, opioid dependence, paperwork burnout, and drug shortages (“Top 7 patient safety issues,” 2020). This paper discusses a patient safety concern in the clinical environment and healthcare issues that impacted teamwork and collaboration during this patient safety concern.
Today, many hospitals are unable to maintain a balance between the number of patients per nurse, resulting in nursing burnout, increased staff turnover, and poor patient outcomes. During my clinical practice, I observed how the COVID-19 pandemic caused burnout for most healthcare workers due to the excessive number of patients who had to be treated with the utmost care and responsibility. Due to the overload, the nurses felt guilty for the tragic outcomes, which had adverse effects on the teamwork.
On the one hand, overload during a pandemic is natural, given the extreme nature of the situation. On the other hand, good administration and recruiting more health workers could make a difference for the better. Lack of time devoted to one patient leads to rare but essential nursing errors and reduces patient monitoring quality. Medical service is teamwork, where all team members are interdependent. Therefore, the lack of nursing time undermines the work of doctors as well. According to statistics, the mortality rate increases by 7% for each additional patient above the norm (“Top 7 patient safety issues,” 2020). Improved patient monitoring allows for predicting the development of the disease and providing necessary treatment in advance, which positively affects patient outcomes.
Thus, the patient safety concern and healthcare issues that impact the teamwork were discussed. During a shortage of medical personnel, effective interaction between all medical team members is disrupted since employees do not cope effectively with the responsibilities assigned to them. The key to solving the problem lies in careful work management and equitable workload distribution. Harmonious redistribution of the load, in many cases, can be done without additional funding, so the administration should not ignore this patient safety concern.