User:Kcarson03/Patient safety

In the medical field there are many things that can lead to a decrease of patient safety. One big influence on this is nurse burnout, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths a year, to billions of dollars spent when having to rectify a new problem, this is a real issue in the world. On average in the medical field, 1 out of 20 prescriptions filled contains an error, considering the billions of prescriptions that get filled ever year there is an insane amount of error happening. And with these errors not only is there a likelihood of a prescription being wrong but there is a $3.5 billion price-tag that goes with that covering the amount that people pay each year for litigation costs and extra days that patients need to stay in hospital beds because of mistakes from the hospital. Out of these patients that end up sitting in beds because of medical malpractice or burnout related decreases in patent safety, around 250,000 of them die a year in the United States alone. This high mortality rate is the third leading cause of death in the country, because when workers are constantly stressed and overworked, mistakes are going to happen. These errors and other variables have caused a significant amount of death within hospitals due to a decrease in patient safety, which is brought on by workers being burnt out and overworked especially during the recent years during the pandemic.

Burnout has been going on for years amongst nurses and other physicians, affecting nearly half of healthcare workers. Burnout has been going on for decades and the term was originally coined by Herbert Freudenberger who was working at a free clinic and overtime he mentioned some of the effects that he had seen, "emotional depletion and accompanying psychosomatic symptoms...excessive demands on energy, strength, or resources". These symptoms are commonly seen today in hospital settings as nurses feel like they are pushed to the edge. This situation is not ideal for people to feel, especially not people who have to look after patients and take care of others who can be in very severe states. Using what Freudenberger described, there was a scale created to measure the amount of burnout in the healthcare field. Known as Maslach's scale, this measures 1) Workload 2) Control 3) Reward 4) Community 5) Fairness and 6) Values. All of these core points work together and the less you have of them the more likely that burnout will occur and cause a major decrease in patient safety. Similarly to Maslach’s scale, there is the Conservation of Resources Theory which essentially states that if one of the four pillars are lost, so is safety and control, “Healthcare organizations and nursing administration should develop strategies to protect nurses from the threat of resource loss to decrease nurse burnout, which may improve nurse and patient safety.” The amount of nursing professionals that have experienced burnout is said to be around 50%, this number leads to an increased risk of adverse events that shouldn't happen, anywhere from 26% to 70% higher risk that something bad will happen to the patient.