Communicating Quality And Safety In Health Care

Written by prominent and internationally renowned scholars, Communicating Quality and Safety in Healthcare engages healthcare trainees from across medicine, nursing and allied health services in a comprehensive and probing discussion of the communication demands that confront today's healthcare teams.

The purpose of this book is to provide a road map to help healthcare professionals establish a "culture of patient safety" in their facilities and practices, provide high quality healthcare, and increase patient and staff satisfaction by improving communication among staff members and between medical staff and patients. It achieves this by describing what each of six types of people will do in distress, by providing strategies that will allow healthcare professionals to deal more effectively with staff members and patients in distress, and by showing healthcare professionals how to keep themselves out of distress by getting their motivational needs met positively every day. The concepts described in this book are scientifically based and have withstood more than 40 years of scrutiny and scientific inquiry. They were first used as a clinical model to help patients help themselves, and indeed are still used clinically. The originator of the concepts, Dr. Taibi Kahler, is an internationally recognized clinical psychologist who was awarded the 1977 Eric Berne Memorial Scientific Award for the clinical application of a discovery he made in 1971. That discovery enabled clinicians to shorten significantly the treatment time of patients by reducing their resistance as a result of miscommunication between their doctors and themselves.

"Nurses play a vital role in improving the safety and quality of patient car -- not only in the hospital or ambulatory treatment facility, but also of community-based care and the care performed by family members. Nurses need know what proven techniques and interventions they can use to enhance patient outcomes. To address this need, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), with additional funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has prepared this comprehensive, 1,400-page, handbook for nurses on patient safety and quality -- Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Nurses. (AHRQ Publication No. 08-0043)." - online AHRQ blurb, http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/nurseshdbk/

This exceptional book for nurses and nursing students guides the development of the comprehensive, professional communication skills to prevent errors that result in patient injuries and death. With a patient-safety focus, thorough coverage of communication and extensive, interactive ancillaries, it demonstrates how communication is tied to desired clinical outcomes.

This case studies book is an indispensable resource for educators, students, and practitioners of nursing. It is innovative in its application of lessons from the communication sciences to common challenges in the delivery of safe patient care. The authors apply basic tenets of human communication to the context of nursing to provide a foundation for practices that can advance the safety and quality of care. The cases, which describe "close calls" and adverse events, are organized along the continuum of healthcare delivery, providing quick access to solutions in commonly encountered care situations. Each case is accompanied by a discussion of how skillful communication can be key to preventing and recovering from errors and adverse events. Thought-provoking discussion questions and references for further reading make this book a valuable reference for nursing educators, students, and practitioners across the world.

Building on the revolutionary Institute of Medicine reports To Err is Human and Crossing the Quality Chasm, Keeping Patients Safe lays out guidelines for improving patient safety by changing nurses' working conditions and demands. Licensed nurses and unlicensed nursing assistants are critical participants in our national effort to protect patients from health care errors. The nature of the activities nurses typically perform â€" monitoring patients, educating home caretakers, performing treatments, and rescuing patients who are in crisis â€" provides an indispensable resource in detecting and remedying error-producing defects in the U.S. health care system. During the past two decades, substantial changes have been made in the organization and delivery of health care â€" and consequently in the job description and work environment of nurses. As patients are increasingly cared for as outpatients, nurses in hospitals and nursing homes deal with greater severity of illness. Problems in management practices, employee deployment, work and workspace design, and the basic safety culture of health care organizations place patients at further risk. This newest edition in the groundbreaking Institute of Medicine Quality Chasm series discusses the key aspects of the work environment for nurses and reviews the potential improvements in working conditions that are likely to have an impact on patient safety.

This volume, developed by the Observatory together with OECD, provides an overall conceptual framework for understanding and applying strategies aimed at improving quality of care. Crucially, it summarizes available evidence on different quality strategies and provides recommendations for their implementation. This book is intended to help policy-makers to understand concepts of quality and to support them to evaluate single strategies and combinations of strategies.