Patient Safety, Physician Accountability and Patient Compensation in Canada



Patient Safety, Physician Accountability and Patient Compensation in Canada

Introduction

The medical health system comprises of three main elements which are; patient safety, physician accountability and patient compensation. These elements run from an undesirable situation. Patient safety is responsible for minimizing the magnitude of undesirable acts in future. Accountability is responsible to make sure that if a physician commits mistake, he is accountable, and the injured patient due to negligence is provided with suitable compensation. Here is a diagram that illustrates the connection among three of them.

Discussion

Patient Safety

Safety related to patients is an essential element in managing and promoting any national health care system (Little, 2009). Patients desire for the safest health care system, while physicians wish to avoid any mishap while dealing their patients. It is impossible to expect the complete elimination of occurrence of undesirable events, but efforts can be made to find and decrease the chances of undesirable medical events through proper education, training and management. The sole aim of patient safety is to avoid undesirable events from taking place.

Patient safety takes the positives out of adverse events and near misses to avoid them in the future. The information obtained from these adverse events should be utilized to change procedures in order to improve and reduce the number of these types of adverse occurrences and to improve patient safety. It is inherent that, it is very important to report everything about an adverse event no matter how many people are at fault and whatever the criticality level is. Patient safety is actually a result of a complex system within a hospital that includes a set of laws, different practices, management, and daily conduct by staff, physicians and doctors.

Physician Accountability

In order to provide the best medical aid and to satisfy ...