It is very important to understand your doctors and caregivers are telling you about your care and treatment. Many people have experienced at doctor’s office that they do not clearly understand what the doctors and other people say regarding the care, treatment or procedures. This brochure published in March 2002 by The Joint Commission for patient safety. The brochure, speak up: At the doctor’s office will help the patients who have problems with hearing, understanding and have a language barrier to clearly understand what the health care provider and caregiver say and prevent any adverse drug events that might occur.
The relationship between patient and caregiver or health care providers is very critical to achieve one’s health care goal, but misunderstanding during a visit will lead to wrong treatment or serious side effect to patients. In the brochure, it emphasizes the ways that people easily reduce the misunderstanding by encouraging them by simply tell doctor’s or caregivers that they do not understand what they were told the patient or ask questions that they do not understand. Also, the brochure handles about culture and religions which will affect when patient make a decision regarding treatment. The communication between patients and healthcare provider is encouraged by feedback that they give to each other regarding patient’s concern and it can be easily achieved by asking questions that to prevent misunderstanding.
The brochure handles not only the most common problems but also baggiest problems that affect patient’s safety that most people might experience in doctor’s office. One of the problems that the brochure handles well is promoting patients to ask any uncertain questions to doctors or caregivers for their own safety. For example, understand the instructions for taking medicine will help to prevent patient to take too much or too little of the medicine that can be dangerous to them.
This topic was interesting because while I was working in the doctor’s office, I had witnessed elderly patients not taking the correct amount of the medicine and did not have precise benefit from the medicine. There were few reasons that they did not follow order taking medications. Some of the reasons were they did not know why they had to take it, and even though they had a question; they just thought medical staff looked too busy and did not want to interrupt to ask a question. By following these asking question to doctors and caregivers will improve medical staffs to understand patients and patients will have better knowledge towards their treatments by simply asking questions. Recent research shows that there were significant incidents that put people at risk, but medication reconciliation rates increased by providing education about prescribed or over the counter medicines (Vejar, Makic, & Kotthoff-Burrell, 2015).
This brochure will be a benefit to elderly or people who speak English as a second language. Because an elderly population has a high number of medications used and comorbidities, educating them will have a huge impact to prevent adverse drug events ((Vejar, Makic, & Kotthoff-Burrell, 2015). Having an interpreter will be a great help to discuss one’s medical concern and treatment plan to non-English speakers. Even though they come with friends and family member, due to the lack of knowledge of medical terminology, it is not easy to have proper medical care or outcome that they want to have. And I strongly believe this will increase patient’s safety because if patients understand their treatments and medications, there will be no room for an error because they understand how to follow the procedures.
This brochure created to increase safety by encouraging patients to speak up about what they want to know about their medical concerns. By simply asking a question in any area of a questionnaire that patients have will be helpful or benefits them. Misunderstanding always leads to wrong way, especially in medical fields, it is very critical. This brochure guides the patient to have the confidence to doctors and caregivers to ask the question if they don’t understand. This brochure also reflected by patient’s race and religion for best treatments that they can get without a
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