How To Stay Safe When Entering The Healthcare System

This book is an urgent call to action centering on the author's thirty-five-year mission to raise awareness of the 250,000 lives that are lost each year to preventable medical harm and the harm faced by healthcare professionals in the form of workplace violence, depression, and burnout resulting in suicide rates higher than almost every other industry. The book's narrative-driven timeline follows the author's 2,452-mile walk to thirty-seven Major League Ballparks using his love of baseball as a way to garner media attention for his mission and indulge in the welcome relief of baseball nostalgia. Written for both medical professional and lay readers, the book pulls in stories of patients and caregivers harmed as a catalyst for change in our healthcare system, and as a way for the public to connect with the issues faced by healthcare professionals. Also included are pivotal anecdotes and stories from his medical career that propelled him to become an internationally recognized patient safety leader. This book will educate, inform, and entertain medical, nursing, and allied healthcare professionals; patients and families affected or harmed by medical care; healthcare leaders; medical, nursing and pharmacy students; and politicians interested in healthcare reform. After reading this book, the lay public will be empowered to question healthcare professionals about the quality of their care and learn how to stay safe when entering the healthcare system. WORDS OF PRAISE The personal stories reveal how Dr. Mayer confronts brutal truths of preventable patient harm, fixes what needs to be changed, and teaches next generation physicians to be leaders in patient safety. You won't want to put the book down, a real page-turner. --Rosemary Gibson, Nationally Acclaimed Author of Wall of Silence and China Rx Dr. Mayer is a literal trailblazer in patient safety, as his astonishing walk across America attests. This book cements his legacy as a patient safety titan, and is, at its core, a vital wake-up call to action for all of us. Read this book and prepare to be inspired. I know I was. --Steve Burrows, Writer/Director of HBO’s Award-winning Documentary Bleed Out. Dr Mayer is an international leader in promoting patient safety. This book is part of that mission. It is a book about an epic walk. It is a book about the art of good medical care. And it is a book that will help readers understand that we all have a role in making our health system safer. --Kim Oates AO MD DSC FRACP, Emeritus Professor, Child and Adolescent Health University of Sydney, Australia Dr. Mayer put himself on the line in walking for patient safety representing all involved in healthcare just as he put his career on the line through unwavering transparency, commitment to social justice, and support for all members of the care teams. It is leaders like Dr. Mayer and the stories within these pages that inspire their courageous dedication to do the right thing for every patient every day every time. --Gwen Sherwood, PhD, RN, FAAN, ANEF, Professor Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Nursing, Co-Editor, Quality and Safety in Nursing: A Competency Approach to Improving Outcomes

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.

"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 unique and engaging open access title provides a compelling and ground-breaking account of the patient safety movement in the United States, told from the perspective of one of its most prominent leaders, and arguably the movement’s founder, Lucian L. Leape, MD. Covering the growth of the field from the late 1980s to 2015, Dr. Leape details the developments, actors, organizations, research, and policy-making activities that marked the evolution and major advances of patient safety in this time span. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, this book not only comprehensively details how and why human and systems errors too often occur in the process of providing health care, it also promotes an in-depth understanding of the principles and practices of patient safety, including how they were influenced by today’s modern safety sciences and systems theory and design. Indeed, the book emphasizes how the growing awareness of systems-design thinking and the self-education and commitment to improving patient safety, by not only Dr. Leape but a wide range of other clinicians and health executives from both the private and public sectors, all converged to drive forward the patient safety movement in the US. Making Healthcare Safe is divided into four parts: I. In the Beginning describes the research and theory that defined patient safety and the early initiatives to enhance it. II. Institutional Responses tells the stories of the efforts of the major organizations that began to apply the new concepts and make patient safety a reality. Most of these stories have not been previously told, so this account becomes their histories as well. III. Getting to Work provides in-depth analyses of four key issues that cut across disciplinary lines impacting patient safety which required special attention. IV. Creating a Culture of Safety looks to the future, marshalling the best thinking about what it will take to achieve the safe care we all deserve. Captivatingly written with an “insider’s” tone and a major contribution to the clinical literature, this title will be of immense value to health care professionals, to students in a range of academic disciplines, to medical trainees, to health administrators, to policymakers and even to lay readers with an interest in patient safety and in the critical quest to create safe care.

Experts estimate that as many as 98,000 people die in any given year from medical errors that occur in hospitals. That's more than die from motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDSâ€"three causes that receive far more public attention. Indeed, more people die annually from medication errors than from workplace injuries. Add the financial cost to the human tragedy, and medical error easily rises to the top ranks of urgent, widespread public problems. To Err Is Human breaks the silence that has surrounded medical errors and their consequenceâ€"but not by pointing fingers at caring health care professionals who make honest mistakes. After all, to err is human. Instead, this book sets forth a national agendaâ€"with state and local implicationsâ€"for reducing medical errors and improving patient safety through the design of a safer health system. This volume reveals the often startling statistics of medical error and the disparity between the incidence of error and public perception of it, given many patients' expectations that the medical profession always performs perfectly. A careful examination is made of how the surrounding forces of legislation, regulation, and market activity influence the quality of care provided by health care organizations and then looks at their handling of medical mistakes. Using a detailed case study, the book reviews the current understanding of why these mistakes happen. A key theme is that legitimate liability concerns discourage reporting of errorsâ€"which begs the question, "How can we learn from our mistakes?" Balancing regulatory versus market-based initiatives and public versus private efforts, the Institute of Medicine presents wide-ranging recommendations for improving patient safety, in the areas of leadership, improved data collection and analysis, and development of effective systems at the level of direct patient care. To Err Is Human asserts that the problem is not bad people in health careâ€"it is that good people are working in bad systems that need to be made safer. Comprehensive and straightforward, this book offers a clear prescription for raising the level of patient safety in American health care. It also explains how patients themselves can influence the quality of care that they receive once they check into the hospital. This book will be vitally important to federal, state, and local health policy makers and regulators, health professional licensing officials, hospital administrators, medical educators and students, health caregivers, health journalists, patient advocatesâ€"as well as patients themselves. First in a series of publications from the Quality of Health Care in America, a project initiated by the Institute of Medicine

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.

This book offers a new, practical approach to healthcare reform. Departing from the priorities applied in traditional approaches, it instead assesses – both theoretically and practically – the successful lessons learned in other safety-critical industries, and applies them to healthcare settings. The authors focus on the importance of human factors and performance measures to establish proactive, systematic methods for healthcare system design. This approach helps to identify potential hazards before accidents occur, enhancing patient safety. In addition, the book details the new approach on the basis of real-world applications in the NHS and insights from NHS staff. Case studies and results are presented, demonstrating the significant improvements that can be achieved in risk reduction and safety culture. Lastly, the book outlines what steps healthcare organisations need to take in order to successfully adopt this new approach. The approach and experiential learning is brought together through the development of a new holistic patient safety education syllabus.

“At last! A book about errors, flubs, and screwups that pushes beyond platitudes and actually shows how to enlist our mistakes as engines of learning, growth, and progress. Dive into The Mistakes That Make Us and discover the secrets to nurturing a psychologically safe environment that encourages the small experiments that lead to big breakthroughs.” DANIEL H. PINK, #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF DRIVE, WHEN, AND THE POWER OF REGRET We all make mistakes. What matters is learning from them, as individuals, teams, and organizations. The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation is an engaging, inspiring, and practical book by Mark Graban that presents an alternative approach to mistakes. Rather than punishing individuals for human error and bad decisions, Graban encourages us to embrace and learn from them, fostering a culture of learning and innovation. Sharing stories and insights from his popular podcast, “My Favorite Mistake,” along with his own work and career experiences, Graban show how leaders can cultivate a culture of learning from mistakes. Including examples from manufacturing, healthcare, software, and two whiskey distillers, the book explores how organizations of all sizes and industries can benefit from this approach. In the book, you'll find practical guidance on adopting a positive mindset towards mistakes. It teaches you to acknowledge and appreciate them, take necessary measures to avoid them while gaining knowledge from the ones that occur. Additionally, it emphasizes creating a safe environment to express mistakes and encourages responding constructively by emphasizing learning over punishment. Developing a culture of learning from mistakes through psychological safety is essential in effective leadership and organizational success. Leaders must lead by example and demonstrate kindness to themselves and others by accepting their own blunders instead of solely pushing for more courage from their team. This approach, as Graban highlights, fosters a positive and productive work environment. The Mistakes That Make Us is a must-read for anyone looking to create a stronger organization that produces better results, including lower turnover, more improvement and innovation, and better bottom-line performance. Whether you are a startup founder or an aspiring leader in a larger company, this book will inspire you to lead with kindness and humility, and show you how mistakes can make things right. Table of Contents: Chapter One: Think Positively Chapter Two: Admit Mistakes Chapter Three: Be Kind Chapter Four: Prevent Mistakes Chapter Five: Help Everyone to Speak Up Chapter Six: Choose Improvement, Not Punishment Chapter Seven: Iterate Your Way to Success Chapter Eight: Cultivate Forever Afterword End Notes List of Podcast Guests Mentioned in the Book More Praise for the Book ”Making mistakes is not a choice. Learning from them is. Whether we admit it or not, mistakes are the raw material of potential learning and the means by which we progress and move forward. Mark Graban's The Mistakes That Make Us is a brilliant treatment of this topic that helps us frame mistakes properly, detach them from fear, and see them as expectations, not exceptions. This book's ultimate contribution is helping us realize that creating a culture of productive mistake-making accelerates learning, confidence, and success.” TIMOTHY R. CLARK, PHD, AUTHOR OF THE 4 STAGES OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY, CEO OF LEADERFACTOR