Week 4: Workarounds and Their Implications for Patient Safety

Using the instructions above, let’s begin a discussion on patient safety, the effects workarounds, and how to integrate informatics tools to improve current practices.Nurses are very busy professionals. More often than not, we are pressed for time while being pulled in many different directions. As a result, many of us adopt “workarounds” (a.k.a. “shortcuts”) to get things done. I’ve seen some brilliant shortcuts in my time, but are we compromising safety when we don’t follow established protocols? After all, we hold patients’ well-being in our hands. As we know, patient safety is an important goal for all of healthcare. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to maintain with all the needs for various patients. As you go through this week’s discussion, I would like to you to also see what informatics can do to improve patient safety and deal with workarounds that occur throughout healthcare. Do you have any experiences in a negative or positive workaround and how informatics could have helped it? Have you been in any situation where patient safety was compromised, and you feel informatics could have prevented it? How can you, as a nursing student, promote patient safety and information confidentiality?

Remember to keep focus on technology when discussing workarounds. I look forward to your responses!