Medical Error in Relation to Care Delivery - Essay Example

"Medical Error in Relation to Care Delivery" is a wonderful example of a paper on medical ethics. Undeniably, medical errors cause harm or death to many Americans every year. A medical error is preventable and includes an adverse effect of care, inaccurate diagnosis, or incomplete treatment of a disease. It involves the failure of a planned action. Medical errors affect health care in many ways. First, repeated medical errors can earn a health facility a bad name. Improved technology enables customers visiting a particular health facility to share their experiences on the web or even verbally. In this regard, patients share their after-treatment experiences, which can make a facility earn a poor public image. Secondly, it is expensive to settle a medical error. For instance, a patient on a wrong prescription will need more attention to identify if they harmed the body. Consequently, the doctor will have to administer correct prescriptions, which means that this patient will spend twice what he could have spent. Thirdly, errors affect the confidence of the person involved. If not properly handled, involved parties lack the trust of colleagues, which may adversely affect organizational morals.

Principles of quality can be used to identify, correct, and prevent errors. According to Becher and Chassin, reducing errors and improving on quality requires systems and care processes that anticipate that human error is inevitable and thus work towards preventing them (Becher and Chassin). All health facilities should establish a system of identifying errors regardless of their size. For organizations to succeed in this, it is important to involve employees who must feel safe about reporting the errors. The management can also establish a non-intimidating system that rewards employees for reporting. In addition, the management can control errors by electing some senior management to perform control checks in all departments regularly. Routine shifts should have a consultant in charge who should inspect the work of the nurses, interns, and other junior consultants.

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