A review of policies and procedures relating to patient safety and healthcare quality

Abstract

Many organisational, technological, human and patient behavioural factors affect patient safety and care quality. Appropriate policies and procedures need to be implemented to improve patient safety and healthcare quality. Much research has been done on these aspects.
This review aimed to answer three questions related to the factors of patient safety and care quality, and policies and procedures to be used to enhance them. Google Scholar was searched to identify the relevant papers published during 2020-2025. After screening and selecting through the PRISMA flow process, 25 papers were finally selected. These papers were described, discussed, and conclusions were drawn.
Based on the findings discussed above, it can be concluded that this review of 25 papers answered all three research questions well. Many organisational, technological, human behavioural and patient behavioural factors were identified to be affecting patient safety and the quality of healthcare. The findings also showed the great promise of IoT and AI tools to ensure patient safety and care quality. Mobile-based applications of these technologies might be more useful. However, none of the papers reported any findings on this aspect. The numerical trends of the reviewed papers show dominance of reviews at the cost of empirical studies, although the quality of these papers was generally good.
Some limitations and scope for further research have been mentioned.