This opinion piece, co-authored by Noel Borg, Chief Operating Officer at CareMalta Group, and Zvetlana Debono, Nursing Manager at CareMalta Group, explores patient safety and person-centred care for older adults in long-term care settings. With an aging population and evolving care needs, ensuring safety while maintaining dignity and effectiveness has become a challenge. Borg and Debono discuss how CareMalta Group is pioneering new standards in safety protocols and fostering an environment that protects and empowers residents.
Patient safety extends beyond acute care to include long-term and community settings, where the risks and potential harm are equally significant. While much research focuses on acute care, errors in long-term and community services can lead to similar risks. Ensuring ethical considerations when it comes to patient safety requires a robust, ongoing staff development program that addresses cultural differences, training gaps, and professional conduct. This is the foundation of safety, where staff are equipped with the necessary training to provide care to the best of their abilities. By maintaining safe care practices, as healthcare providers, we not only ensure quality care but also protect the dignity and well-being of the residents and service users.
Meeting needs safely and effectively
As healthcare providers, prioritizing person-centred care within a systems-based framework is essential. While standard procedures provide critical safeguards for patient safety, it is equally important to adapt care to meet the unique needs of each individual. Residents in long-term care settings have diverse goals and requirements that must be addressed to help them live meaningful lives. Meeting these needs safely and effectively is a key organizational responsibility, ensuring residents are free from unnecessary discomfort.
In the case where care is provided to persons living with dementia patient safety is crucial due to the unique challenges associated with cognitive decline and behavioural changes. Safety challenges associated with the care of residents living with dementia include limited communication, mobility problems, and agitation. Safety measures must balance protection with preserving the dignity and autonomy of individuals with dementia. Considering the complexity of health needs, these have to be addressed with the collaboration of all those involved in care that should include the resident at the focus of the discussion along with the stakeholders involved in the resident care plan.
Beyond prioritizing safety, these efforts promote well-being by nurturing trust, fostering a sense of belonging, and cultivating a home-like environment. Providing safe, personalized care within this supportive and wellness-focused setting is the ultimate aim of all care initiatives.
Persons’ safety: An ethos to long-term care
Person’s safety and ethics have a very unique relationship. The idea that safety is a cocoon in long-term care, is not within relational ethics. The ethical comprehension of persons’ safety approach is attributed to professional conduct. Furthermore, it is important to establish why persons’ safety is ethical in itself as an approach to service delivery. Primarily, the ideal of safety starts with the preamble of doing good, and this by default synchronises with benevolent behaviour, particularly from a principilistic perspective. However, the notion of benevolence, should not be limited and the construct of further ethical reflection must be explored.
As a virtue agent, the safety notion within care settings revolves around how healthcare professionals act. To be safe reflects a justifiable component in justice, setting boundaries in empathy and sympathy, fairness and integrity in practice with self-control and prudence as important aspects of righteous practice in healthcare, particularly in the attribute to persons’ safety. This comprehension gives room to further ascertain the European values, and expression of care ethics in projections of risk exposition and how to mitigate risk with safety considerations.
Ensuring persons’ safety and setting new standards
The understanding of ethics in persons’ safety brings the moral obligation of healthcare providers, and not limited to individuals, to contribute and align in perspectives that enhance and promote safety.
The very basic ethical consideration of respect for human dignity is central to persons’ safety, and person-centredness, and builds the understanding that a persons safety in itself has foundations rooted in the concept of dignity, by truly engaging with persons as persons not being in recognition of ones identity and personhoods, and in turn ensuring performance indicators related with quality and safety.
While to ‘err is human’, intent and action must be carefully evaluated in one’s ability to mitigate practical risks of predisposition, ensuing and ethical standard to persons safety.