Bilgi Yönetim Uygulamalarinin Hasta Güvenliğine Etkisine Ilişkin Bir Araştirma: Afyonkarahisar Ilinde Bir Uygulama

Bu araştırmada, sağlık hizmetlerinde bilgi yönetimi uygulamalarıile hasta güvenliği arasındaki ilişki saptanmaya çalışılarak üst yönetimin konu ile ilgili gerekli çıkarımlar sağlamasıamaçlanmıştır. Arastırmanın örneklemini Afyon il merkezindeki özel, devlet ve üniveriste hastanelerinde çalışan, 362 sağlık personeli oluşturmaktadır. Bu hedef doğrultusunda, hasta güvenliği ile bilgi yönetimi faaliyetlerinin birbiriyle ilişkileri ve bilgi yönetim faaliyetleri ile hasta güvenliği algıdüzeyi araştırılmıştır. Arastırmanın sonucunda, hastanelerde bilgi yönetim faaliyetleri konusunda çalışanların algılarının “olumlu” olduğu ve genel olarak hasta güvenliği algılarının ise “orta” olduğu görülmüştür. Hastanelerde bilgi yönetim faaliyetleri ile hasta güvenliği arasında pozitif ve yüksek derecede bir ilişkinin olduğu ve sağlık hizmetlerinde uygulanan bilgi yönetim faaliyetlerinin hasta güvenliği üzerinde belirleyici bir etkiye sahip olduğu sonucu elde edilmiştir.

In today’s knowledge age, knowledge has become a major asset for healthcare institutions. To use of resources efficiently, identify targets of policies, to action, to monitor events, managers use administrative knowledge. Also health staff use operational knowledge by during monitored and done daily tasks. The uses of this knowledge are necessary in planning, decision making, implementation, control and evaluation of health services in order to access high patient safety. So, health staff need to carry out effective knowledge management activities to fulfill these functions correctly. Health organizations are complex structures that must coping with rapidly changing technology, complex medical procedures and processes, and diverse operations. Health staff have to manage significant amounts of data, maintain current knowledge, update rapidly changing medical information, and adopt all of these changes into appropriate care for patients. The vast amount of information, changing technology, new medications, and complexity of medical care, all of them contribute to an environment that is conducive to medical errors. So knowledge management is an important issue has to be taken in consideration for patient safety as it is the main key for health-care needs assessment, service planning, integrated care planning, disease management and delivery of safety care. In addition to these, knowledge management applications in healthcare are important for the purposes of achieving safety health care outcomes and decreasing medical errors. In this study, knowledge management activities were considered as identifying, creating, sharing, recording, and storage of knowledge and patient safety was taken into consideration under five major dimensions. These factors were event-reporting, leadership in patient safety, safety culture, patient safety training, and technology&environment related to patient safety. To prevent medical errors, to determine risky points and applications within the organization by using error analysis, and to share them in the organization, hospitals need to set up reporting systems. The biggest barrier of patient safety is lack of awareness of the extent of errors in health care facilities. To prevent incidents which risk patient safety, it is important that organizations and employees focus on patient safety and in this sense a safety culture be established within the organization. Fostering a patient safety culture in the organization or creating a health care environment which observes patient safety require that activities for the generation and sharing of scientific knowledge on patient safety be given utmost importance. Hospitals need advanced knowledge management activities for education support to prevent patient safety violations which might result from illness management, infection control, and wrong or inappropriate use of tools and materials. Furthermore, interdisciplinary team training schemes which cover use of simulations and task operating methods must be launched in hospitals to enable their staff to exercise safe practices and receive related training in areas such as operating theaters, intensive care units, emergency departments when expert people share their knowledge and experience on scientific platforms positively contribute to training schemes on patient safety. A meaningful and useful safety program comprehends senior leadership. To minimize errors, hospitals need to accommodate leaders within the organization so that they can track the structure, processes and outputs of the organization with respect to patient safety, raise awareness on patient safety in hospitals. At the same time, if knowledge management activities are thought to play a positive role in realizing operations that are responsibility of leaderships, knowledge management activities are necessary in hospital. Using the current or future technologies by observing patient safety is important for patient safety. Besides new technologies, physical conditions in hospitals must also be investigated and whether they contain any risks which pose a threat to patient safety must be determined when making modifications or renovations in service buildings or units of hospitals which provide health services. The defining possible risks and sharing it to be used by concerned units can contribute to the drafting of regulations on technology and environment with respect to patient safety. As it is known, health services include implementations which require diverse knowledge and intensive use of it even for the simplest decisions. However, critical knowledge for such implementations cannot be accessed in due time, which may trigger a set of diagnostic and treatment faults. Also, healthcare organizations and health staff need certain knowledge in order to offer the best practices, treatment, and care. But they cannot find knowledge when and where they need it and this situation may cause some errors which effect patients in health care. Therefore, we are convinced that the presence of effective knowledge management activities will positively contribute to patient safety. Drawing from this reasoning, we have formulated primary theory to test in the implementation chapter. H.1.Knowledge management activities in hospitals positively contribute to the organization’s patient safety. This study aims at analyzing the effects of knowledge management activities in hospitals to patient safety. The samples of this study are the health staff working in private and, university and, government hospitals in with or without quality certificates in Afyonkarahisar city center and totally 329. Two Ministry of Health hospitals, a private hospital and a university hospital with quality certificates have been sampled. As a means of data collection, a knowledge management & patient safety evaluation questionnaire was developed by the researcher, which consisted of two parts. The first section contained questions on demographics. The second part of our survey was made up of two basic variables in the research model. The dependent variable patient safety contained a total of 36 statements and five sub-groups. These were adapted from Self-Assessment Questionnaire developed by ECRI Institute. The independent variable knowledge management activities was composed of 40 statements regarding the perception of staff towards knowledge management activities. The levels of patient safety and knowledge management activities in hospitals and relationships to each other have been surveyed. The results of analyses showed that there is significant effect of knowledge management practices on the patient safety and the level of employees’ perception of on patient safety is neither a positive nor the negative medium that is the middle level. According to results of the study, also level of employees' perception of knowledge management practices is a positive. As a results of findings obtained from empirical phase of study, effect of hospital knowledge management implementations on patient safety have been determined, providing the opportunity to present conclusions and suggestions