Rethinking Patient Safety

The vast majority of healthcare is provided safely and effectively. However, just like any high-risk industry, things can and do go wrong. There is a world of advice about how to keep people safe but this delivers little in terms of changed practice. Written by a leading expert in the field with over two decades of experience, Rethinking Patient Safety provides readers with a critical reflection upon what it might take to narrow the implementation gap between the evidence base about patient safety and actual practice. This book provides important examples for the many professionals who work in patient safety but are struggling to narrow the gap and make a difference in their current situation. It provides insights on practical actions that can be immediately implemented to improve the safety of patient care in healthcare and provides readers with a different way of thinking in terms of changing behavior and practices as well as processes and systems. Suzette Woodward shares lessons from the science of implementation, campaigning and social movement methods and offers the reader the story of a discovery. Her team has explored an approach which could profoundly affect the safety culture in healthcare; a methodology to help people talk to each other and their patients and to listen through facilitated safety conversations. This is their story.

Over the past decade or so, we have seen a multitude of improvement programmes and projects to improve the safety of patient care in healthcare. However, the full potential of these efforts and especially those that seek to address an entire system has not yet been reached. The current pandemic has made this more evident than ever. We have tended to focus on problems in isolation, one harm at a time, and our efforts have been simplistic and myopic. If we are to save more lives and significantly reduce patient harm, we need to adopt a holistic, systematic approach that extends across cultural, technological, and procedural boundaries. Patient Safety Now is about the fact that it is time to care for everyone impacted by patient safety, how we need to take the time to care for everyone in a meaningful way and how hospitals need to enable staff time to care safely. This book builds on the author’s two previous books on patient safety. Rethinking Patient Safety talked about ways in which we need to rethink patient safety in healthcare and describes what we’ve learned over the last two decades. Implementing Patient Safety talked about what we can do differently and how we can use those lessons learned to improve the way we implement patient safety initiatives and encourage a culture of safety across a healthcare system. Patient Safety Now unites the concepts, theories and ideas of the previous two books with updated material and examples, including what has been learned by patient safety specialists during a pandemic. Patient Safety Now provides the reader with a unique view of patient safety that looks beyond the traditional negative and retrospective approach to one that is proactive and recognizes the impact of conditions, behaviours and cultures that exist in healthcare on everyone. It is written not only for healthcare professionals and patient safety personnel, but for patients and their families who all want the same thing. Too often when things go wrong, relationships quickly become adversarial when in fact this can be avoided by recognizing that, rather than being in separate camps, there are shared needs and goals in relations to patient safety.

Over the last two decades across the globe we have seen a multitude of programs, projects and books to help improve the safety of patient care in healthcare. However, the full potential of these has not yet been reached. Most of the current approaches are top down, programmatic and target driven. These look at problems in isolation one harm at a time with simplistic solutions that fail to support a holistic, systematic approach. They are focused on collecting incident data and learning from failure using tools that are not fit for purpose in a complex nonlinear system. Very rarely do the solutions help build the conditions, cultures and behaviours that support a safer system and help the people involved work safely. Healthcare is stuck in a relentlessly negative approach to safety. Those working in patient safety and healthcare are struggling, and books on patient safety to date instruct the reader to continue doing the same things we have been doing for the last 20 years. This book uniquely combines the latest thinking in safety, including creating a balanced approach to learning from what works as a way to understand why it fails, together with the evidence on building a just culture, positive workplaces and working relationships that we now know are so important for safety. It helps people understand how to address issues despite their complexities and improve safety with practical ways to truly understand what day to day healthcare work is actually like, rather than what people imagine it is like. This book builds on the author’s first book Rethinking Patient Safety which exposed what we need to do differently to truly transform our approach to patient safety. It updates the reader further on the concepts explored in the first book but also vitally helps readers understand the ‘how’. Implementing Patient Safety goes beyond the rhetoric and provides the reader with ideas and examples for how the latest thinking can actually be achieved. It is based on the author’s personal experience of leading a national culture change campaign in the National Health Service for five years. The lessons arise from helping hundreds of organisations and people rethink and implement a whole new way of thinking about improving patient safety in healthcare.

Implementing safety practices in healthcare saves lives and improves the quality of care: it is therefore vital to apply good clinical practices, such as the WHO surgical checklist, to adopt the most appropriate measures for the prevention of assistance-related risks, and to identify the potential ones using tools such as reporting & learning systems. The culture of safety in the care environment and of human factors influencing it should be developed from the beginning of medical studies and in the first years of professional practice, in order to have the maximum impact on clinicians' and nurses' behavior. Medical errors tend to vary with the level of proficiency and experience, and this must be taken into account in adverse events prevention. Human factors assume a decisive importance in resilient organizations, and an understanding of risk control and containment is fundamental for all medical and surgical specialties. This open access book offers recommendations and examples of how to improve patient safety by changing practices, introducing organizational and technological innovations, and creating effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable care systems, in order to spread the quality and patient safety culture among the new generation of healthcare professionals, and is intended for residents and young professionals in different clinical specialties.

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.

"""Reengineering Health Care" gets to the core of transforming our current system by advocating the widespread use of IT, eliminating inefficient practices, and keeping the system focused on a healthy individual and not on a broken process.""--Newt Gingrich, Founder of the Center for Health Transformation, and former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives ""This book is a prescription for streamlining health care. Using the techniques that have successfully transformed business into customer-focused and efficient organizations, the authors provide a step-by-step approach to improving health care processes, guiding health care into the next generation of Lean delivery systems.""--Dr. John Halamka, Chief Information Officer, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center ""In health care, we tend to inundate our people with information, rather than enabling them to have insights. This concise guide will resonate with both senior and front-line managers who know they're engaged in unproductive work. They will see that reengineering is not overly difficult and can enable them to improve patient care and efficiency.""--Trevor Fetter, President and CEO, Tenet Health Corporation, and Trustee, Federation of American Hospitals ""It isn't reform that will fix our ailing health care system, its reengineering. Champy and Greenspun highlight organizations that have transformed, and reinvented, themselves by reengineering care delivery-they've lowered costs, improved care quality and patient safety, and increased the satisfaction of those giving and receiving care. Every clinician, hospital executive, and politician should read this book.""--Bill Crounse, M.D., Senior Director, Worldwide Health, Microsoft Corporation ""Implement health care technology, and you have better health care tools; reengineer with a focus on technology, process, and people, and you have a better health care system. This straightforward guide shows how to transform health care to maximize quality, safety, convenience, and impact the cost of delivery. No one can read this book and not feel a profound call to action.""--H. Stephen Lieber, CAE, President & CEO, HIMSS In their legendary book, "Reengineering the Corporation", Jim Champy and Michael Hammer introduced businesspeople to the enormous power of a revolutionary methodology called "reengineering". Using reengineering, businesses around the world have systematically retooled their processes--achieving dramatic cost savings, greater customer satisfaction, and more value. Now, Jim Champy and Dr. Harry Greenspun show how to apply the proven reengineering methodology in health care: throughout physician practices, hospitals, and even entire health systems. You'll meet innovative and visionary leaders who've been successfully reengineering organizations across the entire delivery spectrum and learn powerful lessons for improving quality, reducing costs, and expanding access. This book doesn't just demonstrate the immense potential of health care reengineering to revolutionize health care delivery: "it offers a clear roadmap for realizing that potential in your own organization""." Deliver Better Care to More People, at Lower Cost How reengineering can lead to more efficient, safer delivery--and sharply reduced costs How to focus on prevention and wellness, as well as chronic disease and hospital care How to earn the trust, contributions, and passion of skeptical physicians and health care professionals How to harness technology to create more seamless, accessible, valued, and sustainable health care systems--and avoid technology's pitfalls How Zeev Neuwirth transformed the Lenox Hill Hospital ER and the 700-doctor Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates practice How Tom Knight is revolutionizing patient safety at Methodist Hospital System, one of America's largest private, nonprofit medical complexes How to start today in your own organization!

Over the last two decades across the globe we have seen a multitude of programs, projects and books to help improve the safety of patient care in healthcare. However, the full potential of these has not yet been reached. Most of the current approaches are top down, programmatic and target driven. These look at problems in isolation one harm at a time with simplistic solutions that fail to support a holistic, systematic approach. They are focused on collecting incident data and learning from failure using tools that are not fit for purpose in a complex nonlinear system. Very rarely do the solutions help build the conditions, cultures and behaviours that support a safer system and help the people involved work safely. Healthcare is stuck in a relentlessly negative approach to safety. Those working in patient safety and healthcare are struggling, and books on patient safety to date instruct the reader to continue doing the same things we have been doing for the last 20 years. This book uniquely combines the latest thinking in safety, including creating a balanced approach to learning from what works as a way to understand why it fails, together with the evidence on building a just culture, positive workplaces and working relationships that we now know are so important for safety. It helps people understand how to address issues despite their complexities and improve safety with practical ways to truly understand what day to day healthcare work is actually like, rather than what people imagine it is like. This book builds on the author’s first book Rethinking Patient Safety which exposed what we need to do differently to truly transform our approach to patient safety. It updates the reader further on the concepts explored in the first book but also vitally helps readers understand the ‘how’. Implementing Patient Safety goes beyond the rhetoric and provides the reader with ideas and examples for how the latest thinking can actually be achieved. It is based on the author’s personal experience of leading a national culture change campaign in the National Health Service for five years. The lessons arise from helping hundreds of organisations and people rethink and implement a whole new way of thinking about improving patient safety in healthcare.

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.