Question

Organizational Behavior Management (OBM) plays a key role in preventing and reducing medical errors. How does OBM impact the reduction of medical errors? Your response should be 1 - 2 pages.

Answer 1

ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR MANAGEMENT ON MEDICAL ERROR REDUCTION

Organizational behavior management(OBM) is a subdivision of application of behavior analysis, it mainly focuses on analysing  what individuals do, why they do and then applies an evidence - based intervention strategy to improve what people do. The role of OBM in health care setting is obvious, especially in medical error management.

Medical errors are the the major issues from the past till present in the public health sector. Patient safety is the first priority of any health workers, therefore excluding medical error is one of the step to acheive this goal. A medical error is a pereventable adverse effect of care, an unintended act or one that does not achieve its intended outcome. there are many errors occur in health care setting including diagnostic, treatment and nursing. there are two types of OBM: antecedent - based intervention and consequence- based interventions.

Antecedent- based interventions include task clarification, modification of equipments, setting up of goal and prompting and training.

Consequence based interventions include getting feedback, praise and incentives( monetary and non monetary).

Implication of antecedent based interventions in prevention of medical error includes;

> Clarification of task; there are many members in a health care system. Setting job description for each worker will ensure safe and easy work to them as a result an error free comprehensive care can be delivered.

> Equipment modification includes making enough changes to the equipments to deliver correct care and resullt. For example, wrong reading of BP by a vital signs machine can result in improper treatment of the client. Therefore periodic checking and maintenance of the equipment should be done to prevent errors.

> Setting up of goals: primary goal of every health worker is ensuring safety and providing quality care to their patients. Nosocomial infections are one of the medical errors, so setting goals to prevent infection or keeping infection rate low is one way to provide excellent health care delivery to their clients.

> Prompting and training: Continuing education among the health worker keep them more updated and help to provide excellent care to their clients. For example, participating in research and evidence based practice is more effective in health care delivery system.

Like antecedent , consequences can take many types,

> Feedback; behavioral feedback , it is one type of consequnce based intervention it includes measuring a targeted behavior and the delivering information about this behavioe to relevant individuals. For example, giving feed back on the apst action of a health worker can later make necessary changes by them if needed and improves error free care.

> Incentives: Giving monetary or nonmonetary rewards to the health worker encourage them to do high performance ,it eventually increases high quality care without any errors.

> Praise: this is another consequence based intervention where praise from a supervispr also encourages the staff to perform effectively.

The effective and goal focused OBM enables the development of error free medical field.