The future of health care continues to shift thanks to advances including health care technology and patient preference. Part of this change includes seeing an increase in the number of patients receiving care in their homes, rather than inpatient treatment. However, patient safety in the home is much less understood than patient safety in other settings.
The Moore Foundation is supporting the Institute for Healthcare Improvement/National Patient Safety Foundation to undertake an effort to help the field better understand the scope of patient safety issues in the home setting as well as strategies and best practices for improving healthcare quality in the home. A first piece of this effort was to prepare a report highlighting the key research in the field. In collaboration with Westat, Institute for Healthcare Improvement/National Patient Safety Foundation recently issued an assessment identifying the challenges and gaps in understanding of issues of patient safety in the home. The challenges are wide ranging and include fragmentation of care, household hazards, ill-prepared family caregivers and lack of training, among other factors.
Moving forward, the IHI/NPSF will build on this work by identifying strategies to improve patient safety in the home setting and provide recommendations to the to the field as they come up with results.
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Thank you for sharing.