Patient Safety and the Medical Laboratory An Introduction

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Patient safety principles are valuable tools to improve the quality of medical laboratory services. Significant numbers of healthcare decisions are based upon medical laboratory test information,¹ which means that improvements in laboratory testing services impact many healthcare delivery processes. Medical laboratory science professionals must assume this important responsibility of improving their contributions to healthcare delivery.

Patient safety is defined as “freedom from accidental injury: avoidance, prevention, and amelioration of adverse outcomes or injuries stemming from the process of care.”² No system or healthcare delivery process is immune to errors that may result in injury to patients receiving care. Some processes are inherently more risky, such as surgery; however, due to the complexity of delivering medical care, each interaction with a patient affects subsequent processes.

Healthcare, more than any other system, has vast opportunities for errors to occur. Many individuals are involved in one patient's care, requiring multiple steps and interactions with multiple providers, seen and unseen. Technology is critical to delivering healthcare, encompassing its multiple information systems to its sophisticated robotic surgery suites, each requiring numerous and varied interactions by healthcare practitioners. Acuity of illness and injury varies depending upon the delivery setting, with hospitals treating the greatest diversity. Much of healthcare delivery is performed under time restrictions, requiring rapid decisions impacting subsequent steps in the care process. Patient flow is unpredictable in many aspects of the delivery system. Lastly, healthcare delivery is prone to distraction, requiring practitioners to manage multiple processes for many patients at the same time.

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ABBREVIATIONS: FN, false negative; FP, false positive; IOM, Institute of Medicine