June is designated as National Safety Month by the National Safety Council, with the directive to “help keep each other safe from the workplace to anyplace.” As both an employer of many “safety sensitive” team members and a service provider to healthcare organizations, it’s worth discussing how the service MedSpeed provides aids in keeping people safe.
If you look up patient safety on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) website, they note that “the occurrence of adverse events due to unsafe care is likely one of the 10 leading causes of death and disability in the world.” While the cause of harm can be from a range of adverse events, nearly 50% of those adverse events are preventable.
Let that sink in for a second. Almost half of those adverse events are preventable. Clearly, the goal must be to keep those “adverse events” to a minimum.
In a survey that we recently facilitated with the American Nurse Journal, we found some startling results related to adverse events which ultimately impact patient safety. 71% of the 353 nurses who responded said a medical courier delay or error impacts their ability to provide patient care at least once a month and nearly one-fifth (19%) said that errors or delays impacted their ability to provide patient care five or more times per month.
The takeaway: what we do at MedSpeed is a vital part of care delivery and is the centerpiece of our mission. Accordingly, we continually invest in our technology and infrastructure to drive the quality and reliability of our service that subsequently enables our customers to drive clinical effectiveness.
Beyond our role in enabling effective patient care, we also have a direct role to play in safety: keeping our roads safe. To this end, we have developed, and continue to enhance, tools that monitor and report on MedSpeeder driving behavior. This complements the robust and reoccurring mandatory safety and training we provide to our driving team to, in concert, make sure MedSpeeders and members of the community are safe.
So, with all this very much top of our mind, we raise the flag of safety awareness highlighted this month and will do all in our power to be a safety steward this month and all others.