Dr Safety

Patient safety is paramount in our quest for high quality and reliable healthcare. As caregivers, we struggle with an inconvenient truth: Humans make mistakes. No human performs perfectly 24 hours per day, seven days a week. Unfortunately, perfection is expected of physicians and nurses. Such unrealistic expectations lead us to use a system of training and punishment that operates under the myth of perfect medical performance. The goal is not attainable, yet we perpetuate this myth day after day. The myth also precludes us from properly examining the systems issues that fail to protect patients from human error. A medical error is defined as the “failure of a planned action to be completed as intended or the use of a wrong plan to achieve an aim…including problems in practice, products, procedures and systems.” Even after more than 10 years of national effort, medical errors persist at alarming rates. A group of investigators reported there were approximately 37,600,000 annual...

It is imperative to the safe care of our patients that an accurate and complete medication history is taken at every visit. Medications must be reviewed for compliance with the agreed upon treatment plan as well as for drug interactions and side effects. National Patient Safety Goals:  *Take extra care with patients who take medicines to thin their blood. *Record and pass along correct information about a patient’s medicines.   Find out what medicines the patient is taking. Compare those medicines to new medicines given to the patient. Make sure the patient knows which medicines to take when they are at home. Tell the patient it is important to bring their up-to-date list of medicines every time they visit a doctor. This is especially important for patients prescribed anticoagulation therapy. If an adequate medication history is not taken, patients may be prescribed warfarin and continue to take an over the counter drug like aspirin. This dangerous ...