Defense Date
9-5-2024
Graduation Date
Fall 12-20-2024
Availability
One-year Embargo
Submission Type
dissertation
Degree Name
PhD
Department
Health Care Ethics
School
McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts
Committee Chair
Gerard Magill
Committee Member
Joris Gielen
Committee Member
Peter Ikechukwu Osuji
Committee Member
Kristine Blair
Keywords
Ethical Requirements, Safely Programs, Clinical Error, Clinical Treatment, Clinical Research, End-of-Life-Care, Ethics Consultation, Clinical Quality, Organizational Leadership, Ethical Professionalism, Rebuilding Public Trust in Healthcare, Organizational Culture, Safety Culture, Patient Centered Care, Racial-Ethnic Disparities, Ethical Principals, Gene Editing, Enhancement, Ethics Education, Ethics Paradigm, COVID pandemic, Clinicians Mental Health
Abstract
Establishing safety programs across healthcare organizations will help to eliminate clinical errors and promote patient safety goals such as culture of quality and safety. Following the 1999 IOM Report, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, regarding the high rate of injuries and deaths due to medical errors, healthcare institutions and policymakers at all levels have continued to draw attention to patient safety programs. As a result, patient safety programs have been implemented nationally to avoid clinical error in healthcare. Regulatory agencies like The Joint Commission, which oversees the voluntary accreditation of hospitals in the U.S. continues to offer relevant policies, guidelines, and instructions on how to achieve compliance with nationwide patient safety goals. Regrettably, incidences of preventable adverse events in healthcare continue to increase daily. Therefore, there remains a continued need for constructing safety programs to analyze the root causes and organizational cultures that facilitate the widespread continuation of medical errors in healthcare. To meet the above need, we develop a 5-point argument (interpreted as ethical requirements) that identifies three specific clinical areas in which medical errors and safety issues continue to arise and offer possible solutions. The three distinctive arenas in which clinical errors and safety issues continue to abound, considers error and safety in clinical treatment; error and safety in clinical research; and error and safety in end-of-life care. Having considered error and safety in these specific clinical arenas, the remaining two arguments focus on advocating for safety in ethics consultations. The goal is to present an ethical approach that combines ethics consultation and safety programs to improve clinical quality in healthcare. Finally, the discussion engages organizational leadership and safety culture to strengthen the understanding of ethical professionalism in healthcare. The outcome of the dissertation is to rebuild public trust in healthcare by avoiding clinical error via safety programs.
Language
English
Recommended Citation
Nweze, A., & Nweze, A. I. (2024). THE ETHICAL REQUIREMENTS TO AVOID CLINICAL ERROR VIA SAFETY (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/2401