Supporting Safer Healthcare

Readers Digest provides a first-hand account of the stress and anxiety medical professionals can feel after a medical error in Doctors Confess Their Fatal Mistakes.  Former Cleveland, Ohio pharmacist Eric Cropp talks about, not just his regret over his error and the subsequent death of a child, but also the enormous impact the event had on his life.  Patient [...]

You may know the story of Taylee Blischke, a newborn who nearly died in April 2009 at Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, California. Morphine was mistakenly given to Taylee, instead of her mother who was holding the infant. California investigators say mother and baby had IVs that were mixed up.  To add insult to injury, the hospital [...]

Ever wonder about your chances of developing a serious post-op infection, or ending up with something accidentally left inside after surgery at your local hospital?   If your hospital is in New Jersey you now have a new way to look up that data, as well as other patient safety information.  The State of New Jersey Department of Health and Senior [...]

 Healthcare is all about transparency these days.  Most organizations strive to increase openness to error disclosure, both internally and externally.  Leadership confidently promises a non-punitive environment because evidence proves that most errors are the result of process flaws, not human inefficiency.  “Report errors, how can we fix what we don’t know is broken?”  It’s all good, right? Well, humans being human and all, is a non-punitive environment [...]

The doctor (physician assistant, nurse, etc.) who makes the mistake needs help too. From the British Medical Journal: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/320/7237/726 ============ When I was a house officer another resident failed to identify the electrocardiographic signs of the pericardial tamponade that would rush the patient to the operating room late that night. The news spread rapidly, the [...]