Joint Commission Essay

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The Joint Commission (TJC) is an independent, nonprofit organization that evaluates and accredits health care organizations in the United States. Their purpose is to improve general health care by evaluating these organizations and making sure they provide safe and effective care of the highest quality (The Joint Commission, 2017). The Joint Commission created the National Patient Safety Goals (NPSG) in 2002 to help recognize areas of concern in patient safety. The NPSG is developed and updated by a panel of nurses, physicians, pharmacists, risk managers, clinical engineers, and other professionals who have experience in dealing with patient safety issues in a variety of settings (The Joint Commission, 2016). This panel works with TJC to find …show more content…
Managing medications for these patients thus becomes an important safety issue. A way of managing these medications is through medication reconciliation. In medication reconciliation, a member of the health care team compares the medications a patient should be using to the new medications that are ordered for the patient and resolves any inconsistencies and discrepancies (The Joint Commission, 2017). The NPSG intends to help organizations decrease the amount of medication errors and negative patient outcomes related to medication discrepancies. Therefore, standards were created in the NPSG that focused on risk points of medication reconciliation such as maintaining and communicating accurate patient medication information, patient education on safe medication use, and coordinating information during transitions of care (The Joint Commission, …show more content…
The patient must be given information on the medications they should be taking when the patient is discharged from the hospital. The Rosa Parks Wellness Institute for Senior Health (RP-WISH) created a program that focused on improving the safety of care by making an increased effort to schedule follow-up appointments and medication reconciliation within 1 week of discharge. They wanted to make this program because the RP-WISH office manager wanted clinical pharmacy specialists and inpatient pharmacists to be directly involved with medication reconciliation which they were never part of before. The plan was to help in care transitions in regards to medications by reconciling patients’ home medication use with primary care and hospital records (Liu & Garwood, 2015). They intended to call patients that were discharged home when the pharmacy finds medication-related problems and to intervene to resolve those problems to avoid adverse drug effects. From March 1 through October 31, 2012, there were 527 out of 638 (83%) discharged patients that were eligible for post-discharge medication reconciliation (Liu & Garwood, 2015). Attempts were made to call 178 (34.0%) of them and 93 (52.2%) of those called were given medication reconciliation. Of the attempted calls, 56.4% of the patients did not answer the call and another 16.5% of the calls failed due to inaccurate phone numbers (Liu & Garwood, 2015). Fortunately,

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