Adverse events are part of serving seniors, pure and simple.
Whether the resident is in your community for short term rehab or to spend their last days, they expect to receive great care. But the reality is, residents fall. They develop skin issues. And family members are processing these changes.
But enough of the dark and gloomy. We simply have to face reality and deal with it.
4 Priorities for Successful Care
There are the four priorities that make us most successful in doing our jobs in a loving and supportive way:
- We have to provide great care
- To provide great care, we have to hire well
- After we hire well, we have to support our staff
- We have to communicate exceptionally with each resident and their family
In a perfect world, if we take care of these four priorities, we'll have no adverse events—and if we have no adverse events, we'll have no liability claims. If we have no adverse events and claims, then everyone is happy and we have lower liability insurance premiums…forever.
Many facilities have never had a claim, some because they are awesome and provide great care, hire well, support well, and communicate well. Some have never had a claim for one reason: they're lucky.
There's another category of facilities: those that adhere to all four of priorities and still have a claim (or two, or three).
Adverse Events Will Happen Eventually
The truth is, adverse events happen all the time and, believe it or not, they rarely become claims. Think about it: in the average nursing community, each resident has approximately 20 "touches" a day by a caregiver. In a 100-bed community, that's 2,000 opportunities for an adverse outcome every 24 hours.
According to a national study, here are four facts about claims that you should understand:
- Claims cost the industry over $2,000 per bed per year
- The industry has roughly one claim per 100 beds each year
- Each claim costs over $200,000
- Claim costs are rising
I know. You've never had a claim and you never will. I hope that's true. By our estimate, less than one in 100 adverse events becomes a claim. You read that right.
So we have established some basics:
- Adverse events happen all the time, but they happen less often in well-run facilities. But they still happen.
- Few adverse events become liability claims.
- That's a good thing, because when they do become liability claims, it's expensive and it is going to get more expensive in the future.
Improving the Odds of Eliminating Incidents
It's critical to have an awareness of the probability that adverse events will impact every facility eventually, but we can manage smartly so that we have less of them. The four priorities above take us far, but not all the way. We can still improve our odds. After providing great care, we have to have systems in place that highlight hotspots and brewing trouble—and this is critical, before it becomes an adverse event and a liability claim.
Let’s get real. How many times have you had resident have a bad fall or a skin issue arise and you were totally surprised? It happens to everybody. Have you had visitor accidents in the parking lot or doorways? I've seen a lot of them.
Many of those events weren't just preventable—they were predictable.
Predicting and Preventing Incidents
How do you predict the occurrence of adverse events? Data.
Where do you get data? From the incident reports you're already generating. But someone has to manually compile it in a spreadsheet and analyze it.
How many spreadsheet expert nurses do you have on staff? Not enough, and they should be providing nursing care.
QA Reader is a quality assurance platform that allows you to build on providing great care by compiling the data for you and organizing your incident data in dashboards that let you focus easily and intuitively exactly where your hot spots are.
QA Reader is simple to implement and saves you money two ways. First, QA Reader compiles your incident reports for you, allowing your nurses to provide care to your residents. Second, it helps you focus the right care where it is urgently needed, whether that's a particular resident, floor, building, or time of day. Plus, QA Reader risk managers review significant incidents to help give you a heads-up and a start to your plan to focus care where it really needs to be.
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