The National Patient Safety Goals (NPSGs) program was introduced by The Joint Commission in 2002. The public became concerned about patient safety after the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) publication of To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System. This publication made Americans aware that patient safety was at stake and, more alarming, yearly deaths were higher than motor vehicle accidents due to preventable adverse events (Kohn, Corrigan, & Donaldson, 2000). Along with concern for patient safety in healthcare organizations came the use of Quality Indicators (QIs) in order to assess performance in healthcare (Farquhar, 2008). The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) serves the public by maintaining and developing QIs since 1998. This paper will provide background information about NPSGs, QIs, and how a NPSGs will improve clinical outcomes for an individual.
Since 2002, the Joint Commission accomplishes the evaluation and assessment of quality of care given to patients through annual NPSGs. A clinical outcome is considered the change in health of a patient through an intervention (Burns & Grove, 2011). NPSGs are significantly important in standards of care for patient care. Evidence based interventions prove a NPSG as a standard of care which has shown improvement of the latest clinical outcomes. Specific health care practices and interventions that have become standards of care are accomplished by starting as a NPSG. Once the goal becomes a standard, the Joint Commission removes it from its list. Improved clinical outcomes occur after interventions have gone through evidence-based practice in the NPSGs.
For example, concern about an increased amount of falls and complications during patients’ hospital stay made it to the NPSG list. Research was aimed at quality improvement to improve clinical outcomes in regards to patient falls nationally. A root-cause analysis (RCA) was used to measure incidence of patient falls after the...