Contemporary Trends in Ergonomics on Patient Safety in Nursing and Mitigation of Adverse Healthcare-Related Errors and Adverse Effects

Description

Key words: patient safety, nurses, health, management, ergonomics, person-centered health services. According to the OECD findings (2020), unsafe care results in over 3 million deaths each year, causing high financial, economic and social costs. In developed countries, excluding safety lapses that may not be preventable, the direct cost of treating patients, who have been harmed during their care, approaches 8.7% of health expenditure a year. A human capital approach suggests that eliminating harm could boost global economic growth by over 0.7% a year. Errors cause losses and lower productivity not only in the operation of medical institutions, but also in national economy. The issue of patient safety is actual in Latvia, therefore the review of the contemporary scientific literature was made to summarise and analyse previous researches and theories in nurses’ role in hospitals' efforts to improve patient safety as well as applied tools that help prevent adverse health care-related errors and effects that may develop in patients.. A literature search was performed in ScienceDirect and Google Scholar to retrieve studies on nurses’ role in patient safety and applied methods that can be used to prevent adverse health care-related errors and adverse effects that may develop in patients. Information was analysed and synthesized, monographic method used.. Results of the study show that patient safety should be patient-centered. Nurses’ perception, involvement of patients and their families, teamwork, communication play an important role in assuarance of patient safety. Errors in patient safety occur mostly because of the human factors (ergonomics).. Although the concept of patient safety has grown in recent years, there is a need for a more rapid integration of patient safety-related internal control tools into the hospitals' quality management system. Since improvements in the quality management system may be associated with the significant investments, process management should be improved.

Period	29 Mar 2023
Event title	RSU Research week 2023: Society. Health. Welfare
Event type	Conference
Conference number	9
Organiser	Rīga Stradiņš University
Location	Riga, LatviaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International