ECRI President and CEO
Staffing shortages topped the list of safety concerns of healthcare providers, according to an annual report released Monday by ECRI.
The organization suggests that providers use the list in planning and continuous quality improvement efforts and for resource allocation to address the issues as performance improvement projects.
ECRI said that a wide range of disciplines, among them aging services, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, health technology, patient safety, quality, risk, ethics, industrial and systems engineering, and law, helped select and evaluate the topics represented in the report.
“Continuity of care is almost impossible without continuity of staffing,” ECRI President and CEO Marcus Schabacker, M.D., Ph.D., told the McKnight’s Business Daily. “The aging services sector, like other care settings, has been hard hit. The reasons for it are multi-dimensional and most likely have several root causes.”
Staffing shortages are nothing new, but the challenges have grown exponentially during the pandemic, according to ECRI.
“An organization’s culture of safety must prioritize emergency preparedness and response, mental health of caregivers and supply-chain resiliency. Each of these areas can help to strengthen a staff person’s commitment to an organization, because it demonstrates the importance of their service and contribution,” Schabacker added.
Supply chain disruptions significantly affect care facilities, for both staff members and residents.
“If the appropriately safe supplies that are necessary to deliver care or protect these two populations are not available when they are needed and in the right quantities, safety issues arise in one group which can quickly spread to another,” Schabacker said.
Supply chain issues, he added, also can lead to lower satisfaction for residents and staff members, contributing to operational issues such as reduced occupancy and increased staff turnover.
“A lack of supply chain resiliency can also be very harmful to a provider organization’s financial stability through increased direct and indirect costs, which can in turn lead to additional safety concerns and ultimately a lack of sustainability for the system,” Schabacker said.
The entire 2022 list of imminent patient safety challenges:
- Staffing shortages
- COVID-19 effects on healthcare workers’ mental health
- Bias and racism in addressing patient safety
- Vaccine coverage gaps and errors
- Cognitive biases and diagnostic error
- Non-ventilator healthcare-associated pneumonia
- Human factors in operationalizing telehealth
- International supply chain disruptions
- Products subject to emergency use authorization
- Telemetry monitoring
