All Entries Tagged With: "simple patient safety solutions"
Does “ethics checklist” have a place at your hospital?
In the last year, much has been made of the power of checklists. Peter Pronovost and his team from Johns Hopkins succeeded at proving a checklist used in Michigan ICUs helped reduce or prevent central line infection rates. Recently this was replicated in hospitals around the country. The World Health Organization (WHO) Surgical Safety Checklist was proven to reduce surgical errors by one third in operating rooms around the country, and has been incorporated into the IHI’s latest campaign.
Last month the British Medical Journal published a study about a new type of checklist–an ethics checklist. This article in American Medical News provides a more in-depth look at the checklist and uses. Some interesting questions come out of the use of this new checklist, which is currently being piloted at Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C. One of these is are checklists becoming an of-the-moment solution for many patient safety concerns?
The American Medical News article contains feedback from both Pronovost and Atul Gawande, director of the WHO initiative. Both agree that checklists alone will not change the behavior of healthcare workers. For specific interventions they have succeeded because of commitments to culture change and an understanding of why the checklist is useful.
The ethics checklist contains items such as ensuring patients’ ideas about treatment , end-0f-life wishes, and family situation/ interactions are all clear. Those who are piloting the checklist are excited about the potential it has to integrate ethics questions more easily into patient care.
AHRQ announces states involved in CLABSI prevention project
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has decided which states will participate in its $3 million grant for preventing central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI) in intensive care units (ICU). This press release from the AHRQ caught my eye because I wrote a story for Briefings on Patient Safetywhen this program was announced. The program will model similar prevention efforts after the Johns Hopkins University and the Michigan Hospital Association’s project that reduced these types of infections in 100 Michigan ICUs. The states announced to be involved in the study are California, Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington.
The goal for these states is to reduce CLABSI by 80%. Currently, the rates of infection nationally are five per every 1,000 patient days. The Michigan program set the bar high, and is the reason for replication on a broader scale. Within three months there, infection rates in more than half or participating ICUs dropped to 0%.
It seems that there was so much interest in participating in the study that the AHRQ had to turn interested states away. However, it says that the Johns Hopkins Quality and Safety Research Group has received some additional private funding to involve some of those states.
Simple solutions for patient safety
The HealthLeaders Media Industry Survey 2009, released earlier this week, shows that many healthcare leaders think that while technology is an important part of patient care, driving home the fundamentals of patient safety is actually more important. For example the notion that handwashing is far more effective at preventing HAIs than implementing some sort of technology that monitors infection rates. In fact, only 12% of who answered the survey said that their electronic medical records played a large part in improving quality and patient safety.