Standard operating procedures as a trend in ensuring healthcare safety

Abstract

An analysis of healthcare safety indicators has shown that risks associated with providing healthcare which occur in medical organizations lead to additional economic and material losses, lower efficiency of government measures aimed at developing healthcare, and poorer public trust in a healthcare system. One of the basic reasons for this situation is the lack of proper regulation of the activities performed by medical organization personnel whose work is related to healthcare provision. At present there is no scientific justification and procedures required to ensure the needed safety of patients and healthcare professionals are not established. Also, the functions of healthcare personnel related to ensuring healthcare safety have not been formalized and standardized, and also certain methodical ways of ensuring healthcare safety have not been established. The regulation of certain recurring procedures, important for healthcare safety, is most efficiently provided through SOPs. The risk assessment methodology allows to identify the most important elements of the activities performed by the medical organization personnel, to develop and implement standard operating procedures the use of which increases healthcare safety. The authors worked out basic principles (an algorithm) of standard operation procedures (SOP) development used to ensure safety in the field of healthcare which can be considered universal and can be applied at any healthcare organization. According to the mentioned principles and taking the relevance into account, the authors have described certain types of activities performed by healthcare personnel and developed standard operation procedures in the field of healthcare safety. The research of SOP's implementation efficiency at core medical organizations is being performed at the moment.