Medical/Surgical Asepsis & Error Prevention

The National Patient Safety Goals emphasize correct patient identification (two identifiers, never room number), reducing harm from look-alike/sound-alike medications, and preventing wrong-site/wrong-patient/wrong-procedure errors through the Universal Protocol (pre-procedure verification, site marking, a final "time out"). When an error does occur, an incident report is completed as a quality/risk-management tool — it is never referenced in the patient's chart, and its purpose is system improvement, not punishment.