Patient safety and quality of care in Indonesia: Challenges and opportunities for professional health resources from the ASEAN economic community

This study identified current knowledge gaps and contextual considerations for collecting data on patient safety in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Additionally, this study has identified patient safety and quality of care improvement activities for health care services in Indonesia and described patient safety and quality of care in regards to challenges from mutual recognition arrangements (MRAs) and health professional mobility. Asystematic review was performed using online journal search engines (Google Scholar, PubMed, ScienceDirect) with the following keywords: patient safety, quality of care, and Indonesia. As a result, 1,828 papers were found. After checking for duplications, the papers were further screened with the following keywords: skill competency, awareness, and knowledge of quality of care. This resulted in a selection of 49 papers. For the last step, only papers published from 2005 to 2016 were selected, which resulted in just seven papers. These results showed that most workers in health care centres did not understand the concept and definition of patient safety. There were no modules or guidelines available. Hospital patients were grouped into three segments, namely core service patients, complainers and salient patients. Medical errors were divided into four types, errors in administration (59%), transcription (15%), dispensing (14%) and prescribing (7%). Of these errors, 2.4% were classified as potentially serious and 10.3% as potentially significant. One paper stated that there were six types of service failures, including medical reliability errors, physical evidence errors, poor information, medical treatment errors, costly services and complaint handling failures. Patient safety implementation procedures have been limited to medical personnel and health care providers. A primary health centre (PHC) needs five dimensions for the implementation of patient safety systems: dimensions of consciousness, commitment, identifying risk factors, compliance with incident reporting, and professional competence.