Patient Safety Concept and Importance

Patient safety is a fundamental concept that includes systematic approaches to prevent harm to patients during the delivery of healthcare services. It is an integral part of the quality of healthcare services and aims to minimize errors and unwanted events by identifying risks that may occur in patient care processes in advance..
 

What is Patient Safety?

Patient safety encompasses procedures, policies and cultural approaches to identify, assess and take preventive measures against risks that may occur during health care. Issues such as prevention of medical errors, infections, drug safety issues and surgical complications form the basis of patient safety practices..
 

Why Patient Safety is Important?

Healthcare has become much more complex today with new medicines, advanced treatment methods, digital health applications and advancing technology. Although studies on patient safety came to the agenda with the patient rights studies, the increased attention to this issue was due to the report published by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 1999. According to this report, 44,000-98,000 people die annually in the United States due to medical errors. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), millions of patients are harmed by unsafe healthcare services every year. In developed countries, 5-10% of hospitalized patients contract nosocomial infections and 7.5-10.4% are exposed to side effects of medications each year. In developing countries, 5-15% of patients are infected with HIV due to unsafe blood transfusions..

The first of the six issues that the IOM has identified for the 21st century for improving the health system is “Safe health care”, i.e. patient safety. He explains this as avoiding harm while helping patients. In this context, in order to prevent medical errors and adverse events, it is imperative that all risks are well identified and strategies for prevention are developed to ensure that individuals get the best results from health services..

Patient safety is not only the responsibility of healthcare professionals, but also a process that requires the conscious participation of patients and their relatives.  

Our hospitals carry out practices in accordance with national and international standards to ensure patient safety at the highest level and provide healthcare services with a patient-oriented care approach..