Dr Safety

Here is my latest publication regarding improving hospital patient safety.  In this quick review I report on 6 principles most hospitals or practices can begin to institute today to start on the road to safer healthcare. The six principles are: We’re only human Leadership paves the road to high reliability Quality improvement is a part of everyone’s workday Planning is everything It’s what you know that matters One size does not fit all Many thanks to the editors of Patient Safety and Quality Healthcare. Hope this meets with your satisfaction!  https://www.psqh.com/analysis/improving-hospital-patient-safety-six-basic-principles-to-guide-our-pursuit/

Quality healthcare is composed of six dimensions.  Patient Safety is the first dimension of quality. Patient Centeredness, Timeliness and Clinical Effectiveness follow closely behind.  Equitability and Efficiency round out the equation. According to AHRQ: "Safe: Avoiding harm to patients from the care that is intended to help them. Effective: Providing services based on scientific knowledge to all who could benefit and refraining from providing services to those not likely to benefit (avoiding underuse and misuse, respectively). Patient-centered: Providing care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs, and values and ensuring that patient values guide all clinical decisions. Timely: Reducing waits and sometimes harmful delays for both those who receive and those who give care. Efficient: Avoiding waste, including waste of equipment, supplies, ideas, and energy. Equitable: Providing care that does not vary in quality because of pers...

BE A HERO - Get your Flu vaccination today! Flu season is here! “Influenza is a serious disease that can lead to hospitalization and sometimes even death. Every flu season is different, and influenza infection can affect people differently. Even healthy people can get very sick from the flu and spread it to others.” [Ref 1] Immunization with the flu vaccine is the best way to prevent influenza infection. Patients give many reasons for not getting their annual flu shot, including: “It causes the flu"; "I don’t need it"; "It has side effects"; "It’s not effective"; "I didn’t think about it"; "I don’t like needles!”  “Annual vaccination is the most important measure to prevent seasonal influenza infection. Achieving high influenza vaccination rates of healthcare professionals and patients is a critical step in preventing healthcare transmission of influenza...” [Ref 2] The fact is that every year up to 49,000 American...

• E = QA 2 • Effective results (E) are equal to the Quality (Q) of the solution times the Acceptance (A) of the idea times the Accountability (A) for the implementation • 62% of quality efforts fail from lack of attention to the cultural or people side of change - the "A’s"

Today's post comes to us from the 19 th Century. “Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (1818-65) a Hungarian obstetrician educated at the universities of Pest and Vienna, introduced antiseptic prophylaxis into medicine. In the 1840s, puerperal or childbirth fever, a bacterial infection of the female genital tract after childbirth, was taking the lives of up to 30% of women who gave birth in hospitals. Women who gave birth at home remained relatively unaffected. As assistant professor on the maternity ward of the Vienna General Hospital, Semmelweis observed that women examined by student doctors who had not washed their hands after leaving the autopsy room had very high death rates. When a colleague who had received a scalpel cut died of infection, Semmelweis concluded that puerperal fever was septic and contagious. He ordered students to wash their hands with chlorinated lime before examining patients; as a result, the maternal death rate was reduced from 12% to 1% in 2 years.  ...

Human factors research has shown that even highly skilled, motivated professionals are vulnerable to error due to human limitations.   Research has also shown that teams that communicate effectively and back each other up reduce the potential for error, which results in enhanced safety and improved performance.       Teamwork principles and training techniques apply to a hospital as well as every other healthcare organization. • Leadership – how to direct and coordinate, assign tasks, motivate team members, facilitate optimal performance. • Situation monitoring – how to develop common understandings of team environment, apply strategies to monitor teammate performance and maintain a shared mental model. • Mutual support – how to anticipate other team members’ needs through accurate knowledge and shift workload to achieve balance during periods of high workload or stress. • Communication – h...

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...