Week 4: Workarounds and Their Implications for Patient
Safety 6 6 unread replies. 6 6 replies.
What is a workaround? Identify a workaround (specific to technology used in a hospital setting) that
you have used or perhaps seen someone else use, and analyze why you feel this risk-taking behavior
was chosen over behavior that conforms to a safety culture. What are the risks? Are there benefits?
Why or why not?
Discuss the current patient safety characteristics used by your current workplace or clinical site.
Identify at least three aspects of your workplace or clinical environment that need to be changed
with regard to patient safety (including confidentiality), and then suggest strategies for change.
Post 1
A. What is a workaround?
A workaround is a plan or method to circumvent a problem without eliminating it. Individuals or
groups create a simpler way of getting a task completed by bypassing a series of evidence-base
steps or equipment’s to s meet a goal or to achieve it more readily but can be a violation or
procedural failure and may not always provide better patients outcomes and safety (Debono et
al., 2013).
A workaround I have seen in the clinical setting is nurses leaving patients sliding sheets under
people with limited mobility to make repositioning them easier. This “workaround” can cause
skin breakdown in patients because the materials is non-breathable this risk-taking behavior save
time when repositioning patients, so several tasks can be accomplished in a shorter time. This
practice causes more harm to the patients and I personally feel this should be stopped
immediately.
B. Discuss the current patient safety characteristics used by your current workplace or
clinical site. Identify at least three aspects of your workplace or clinical environment
that need to be changed with regard to patient safety (including confidentiality), and
then suggest strategies for change.
2 A workaround that I notice is narcotics and insulin verification by a second nurse before it is
, be administered to the patients. Narcotics and insulin can be detrimental to patients and the
policy to prevent errors when administering these drugs is to improve patient safety, but I
think the reasons for this workaround nurses are trying to maximize their time by multitasking
and to get another nurse to do verification increase the amount of time spent in the room and
seeing other patients.
3 Secondly leaving patients on mobility sheets, these sheets are made with canvas/satin
materials and this increase the risk of a patient falling out of the bed and causing more injury
so removing these sheets after use as intended will increase patient safety.
4 Also following evidence-base protocol when administering medication improved patient
safety and prevent poor outcomes in patients. Medication errors is a major problem in nursing,
so following verification process will decrease the chance of causing harm or potentially
killing a patient (Effken, McGonigle, & Mastrian, 2015).
Reference
Debono, D. S., Greenfield, D., Travaglia, J. F., Long, J. C., Black, D., Johnson, J., &
Braithwaite, J. (2013). Nurses' workarounds in acute healthcare settings: a scoping
review. BMC Health Services Research, 13(1), 1-16. doi:10.1186/1472-6963-13-175
Effken, J., McGonigle, D. & Mastrian, K. (2015). Nursing Informatics and the
Foundation of Knowledge, 3rd Edition. [Bookshelf Online]. Retrieved from
https://bookshelf.vitalsource.com/#/books/9781284063691/
Post 2
1.) What is a work around? What are the risks and benefits?
A work around is when there are set rules, guidelines, and protocols to follow but
someone departs from those protocols and may put the patients safety at risk. A
workaround that I noticed during my clinical experience is when the nurses that students
follow maybe in violation of HIPAA, the confidentiality and privacy law. Many times all
the nurses would leave the floor to meet for what they call "huddle" and many times they
leave there computers logged on in the hallways. This was done to help us (student
nurses) gather info for our clinical paperwork. "HIPAA has accomplished its primary
objective: making patients feel safe giving their physicians and other treating clinicians
sensitive information while permitting reasonable information flows for treatment,
operations, research, and public health purposes." For this reason it is important to follow
the set guidelines and protocols regarding patient privacy.
What are the risks? The risk can be that there are always family members walking up and
