DB'S MEDICAL RANTS

Internal medicine, American health care, and especially medical education

Search

More thoughts on safety

First, I was very careful to not invoke never events or 100,000 deaths.  Both ideas detract from the important conversation.

Central line infections actually are the best example.  As Peter Provonost has proven, we can greatly limit central line infections.  Using the checklist that he developed minimizes these infections to a very small number.  We could measure the percentage of central line infections as a useful measure.  This one point that has been made well in the literature.

The big issue (and I will be addressing this more in the near future) is creating a culture of safety in every hospital.  While we can measure a few things, we cannot really measure this culture.  Rather we probably need a group of safety experts to visit hospitals and evaluate the overall safety culture.

I do not know how many deaths occur each year due to safety issues, but I do know that there are too many deaths and too much morbidity.  We need to understand how mistakes are made and develop systems that decrease those mistakes.

The ongoing hatred of EMRs is, in my opinion, irrational.  EMRs are not perfect, but properly used they can decrease medication errors.  We need some modifications of record keeping, but physician order entry will decrease errors – that is a fact.

We do need to improve safety.  We can do that, and to argue otherwise seems disingenuous to this blogger.

Categories
Meta
Blogroll
Newer Blogs