Safety in Healthcare: not such a new concept
Register by noon, Monday, May 21, 2012.
In 1999 the Institute of Medicine issued the landmark report, “To Err is Human”, bringing to light the problem of preventable medical errors, and the harm these cause. The estimate at that time was 44,000 – 98,000 deaths per year caused by preventable errors resulting in lethal harm. This is more than car wrecks, breast cancer, and AIDS. It is also the equivalent of a fully loaded jumbo jet crashing every 1 – 2 days. Current reviews estimate that this rate has not decreased, now 13 years later.
In contrast, the aviation industry has nearly engineered all lethal harm from its system. In 2010 there were 9,413,000 scheduled departures, with 26 accidents, and no fatalities. The nuclear power industry has a similar record: the total number of significant accidents from 1952 to the recent Japanese disaster fits on a single page. Clearly, there is a fundamental difference between the way errors and subsequent harm are approached in these industries, compared to medicine. To claim to have high quality in the delivery of health care, we must engineer this harm from our system.
My organization, Piedmont Healthcare, has undertaken a multiyear project to dramatically reduce the rate of harm in our hospitals. Working with an experienced partner, we are bringing the approaches of both aviation and the nuclear power industry to our hospitals. Adapting these techniques to the delivery of health care has been shown to reduce the rate of preventable harm by as much as 80%.
This talk will explore the problems around safety in healthcare, and the approach Piedmont is taking to reduce preventable harm. The current structure and the barriers to reducing harm will be discussed. The approaches that have proven effective will be shown, and the program Piedmont is undertaking described. It is hoped that with these straight forward process changes, we can even better deliver what our patients expect from us: “heal me, don’t hurt me, and be nice to me”.
This month's mini-presentation is on public speaking.
