An adverse incident occurred during your shift today. You have been told that there had been a mistake made with medication, and the wrong medication was given to the wrong patient. The team is following the open disclosure policy to respond to this incident. 

Discuss three benefits to staff from participating in open disclosure in this situation.

n a healthcare setting, an open disclosure is a type of an open discussion where adverse events which result to a patient getting harmed while they are receiving the healthcare are discussed. The open disclosure can include the patient who was harmed, their care givers as well as support staff from the healthcare. It aims at openly discussing the incident that might have caused harm to the patient and thus plays a vital role in ensuring that the patients are included as active players in their healthcare. 

In the situation above, the wrong medication was given to the wrong patient and thus an open disclosure is important in order to help solve the situation at hand. With the team following up on the open disclosure policy which is used to respond to the incident, they will be able to gain several benefits. Among the benefits that the staff will be able to gain are;

• The staff will be able to learn how to assist the patients in recovering from a healthcare harm. The open disclosure will include ways through which the patient will be able to recover from the trauma of the wrong treatment at the hospital. When the staff is following, they will be able to gather this knowledge and use it in future incase a similar case of healthcare harm comes up during their shifts. 
• The staff will increase knowledge on how to improve the patient safety and the quality of care that they give to their patients. The open disclosure will act as a platform where the staff will be reminded on the importance of offering quality care to patients and it will also act as a learning platform where the staff will learn new ways that will help promote patient safety and quality care.
• The open disclosure will also benefit the staff since it will give them a better understanding on how to manage an unintended patient harm. From how the nurse or physician who is handling the open disclosure handles the incident of wrong medication to wrong patient, the staff who are following the open disclosure will learn new techniques and skills on how they should manage such an incident in the future. 

Step-by-step explanation

An open disclosure ensures an open, empathic, timely and honest discussion between the patient and a health care attendant after the patient has suffered a safety incident. An effective open disclosure helps in improving the patient and healthcare staff confidence in relation to how the system responds to the patient safety incidents. It is a fundamental towards the maintenance of trust between the consumers of healthcare and the health care givers.  It is a process that facilitates an appropriate resolution to the harmed patient as well as to the healthcare staff. I t helps in preventing a recurrence of a patient's safety incident since the healthcare staffs learn how to avoid such incidences. 

REFERENCES

Harrison, R., Birks, Y., Bosanquet, K., & Iedema, R. (2017). Enacting open disclosure in the UK National Health Service: A qualitative exploration. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 23(4), 713-718.

Walton, M., Harrison, R., Smith-Merry, J., Kelly, P., Manias, E., Jorm, C., & Iedema, R. (2019). Disclosure of adverse events: a data linkage study reporting patient experiences among Australian adults aged≥ 45 years. Australian Health Review, 43(3), 268-275.

Westrick, S. J. (2017). Legal and Ethical Accountability for Nursing Errors: Disclosure and Apology.