The book concerns itself with a subject that has been the focus of concern for some time, with an increasing number of cases coming into public domain. The health service is finally admitting that its workers make mistakes, but has this far been reluctant to consider ways of dealing with them efficiently. Dr. Waluube considers the question from all sides, the doctors and hospitals as well as the patients', putting forward plans that should reduce the number of errors and improve ways of dealing with them when they occur. He also examines new measures being implemented following an inquiry in 1999.
Quality and Safety in Anesthesia and Perioperative Care offers practical suggestions for improving quality of care and patient safety in the perioperative setting. Chapters are organized into sections on clinical foundations and practical applications, and emphasize strategies that support reform at all levels, from operating room practices to institutional procedures. Written by leading experts in their fields, chapters are based on accepted safety, human performance, and quality management science and they illustrate the benefits of collaboration between medical professionals and human factors experts. The book highlights concepts such as situation awareness, staff resource management, threat and error management, checklists, explicit practices for monitoring, and safety culture. Quality and Safety in Anesthesia and Perioperative Care is a must-have resource for those preparing for the quality and safety questions on the American Board of Anesthesiology certification examinations, as well as clinicians and trainees in all practice settings.
Principles of Risk Management and Patient Safety identifies changes in the industry and describes how these changes have influenced the functions of risk management in all aspects of healthcare. The book is divided into four sections. The first section describes the current state of the healthcare industry and looks at the importance of risk management and the emergence of patient safety. It also explores the importance of working with other sectors of the health care industry such as the pharmaceutical and device manufacturers. Important Notice: The digital edition of this book is missing some of the images or content found in the physical edition.
Drug Safety in Developing Countries: Achievements and Challenges provides comprehensive information on drug safety issues in developing countries. Drug safety practice in developing countries varies substantially from country to country. This can lead to a rise in adverse reactions and a lack of reporting can exasperate the situation and lead to negative medical outcomes. This book documents the history and development of drug safety systems, pharmacovigilance centers and activities in developing countries, describing their current situation and achievements of drug safety practice. Further, using extensive case studies, the book addresses the challenges of drug safety in developing countries. - Provides a single resource for educators, professionals, researchers, policymakers, organizations and other readers with comprehensive information and a guide on drug safety related issues - Describes current achievements of drug safety practice in developing countries - Addresses the challenges of drug safety in developing countries - Provides recommendations, including practical ways to implement strategies and overcome challenges surrounding drug safety
Featuring contributions by an international team of the world’s experts in urology and gynecology, this fifth edition reinforces its status as the classic comprehensive resource on female urology and urogynecology and an essential clinical reference in the field, with new chapters throughout. Each volume is now available separately. *Offers a comprehensive guide to medical aspects *Covers important classic and newer topics *Presents a practical and manageable level of detail
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
With the increased emphasis on reducing medical errors in an emergency setting, this book will focus on patient safety within the emergency department, where preventable medical errors often occur. The book will provide both an overview of patient safety within health care—the 'culture of safety,' importance of teamwork, organizational change—and specific guidelines on issues such as medication safety, procedural complications, and clinician fatigue, to ensure quality care in the ED. Special sections discuss ED design, medication safety, and awareness of the 'culture of safety.'
The conventional approach to risk communication, based on a centralized and controlled model, has led to blatant failures in the management of recent safety related events. In parallel, several cases have proved that actors not thought of as risk governance or safety management contributors may play a positive role regarding safety. Building on these two observations and bridging the gap between risk communication and safety practices leads to a new, more societal perspective on risk communication, that allows for smart risk governance and safety management. This book is Open Access under a CC-BY licence.
"Medication errors are the most common of all medical errors and pose a tremendous emotional and physical cost to patients and economic burden to our health system. The most reliable estimates of medication error in anesthesia place the rate at 1-2 in every 10 administrations, or 1 in every anesthetic. Most of the errors are harmless but other wreak devastation. These errors are a failure to plan well, or to carry out a well-designed plan; less talked about but perhaps more important are routine violations of best practices. Errors arise through fast and slow thinking; violations arise from a myriad of causes. There is an extensive body of expert consensus on how to improve medication safety, starting with an institutional commitment to improving medication safety, and ending with an individual practitioner committing to doing the right thing every time. Technical solutions, pharmacy solutions, standardization, and a safety culture are major themes in medication safety. Despite knowledge of what would make us safer, economic costs, a perceived lack of urgency, human resistance to change all conspire to medication safety difficult to achieve. Low-income countries face particular challenges in medication safety. Despite these challenges, we must dedicate ourselves anew to this goal - our patients deserve no less"--
Medical mistakes are more pervasive than we think. How can we improve outcomes? An acclaimed MD’s rich stories and research explore patient safety. Patients enter the medical system with faith that they will receive the best care possible, so when things go wrong, it’s a profound and painful breach. Medical science has made enormous strides in decreasing mortality and suffering, but there’s no doubt that treatment can also cause harm, a significant portion of which is preventable. In When We Do Harm, practicing physician and acclaimed author Danielle Ofri places the issues of medical error and patient safety front and center in our national healthcare conversation. Drawing on current research, professional experience, and extensive interviews with nurses, physicians, administrators, researchers, patients, and families, Dr. Ofri explores the diagnostic, systemic, and cognitive causes of medical error. She advocates for strategic use of concrete safety interventions such as checklists and improvements to the electronic medical record, but focuses on the full-scale cultural and cognitive shifts required to make a meaningful dent in medical error. Woven throughout the book are the powerfully human stories that Dr. Ofri is renowned for. The errors she dissects range from the hardly noticeable missteps to the harrowing medical cataclysms. While our healthcare system is—and always will be—imperfect, Dr. Ofri argues that it is possible to minimize preventable harms, and that this should be the galvanizing issue of current medical discourse.
