An interesting article: The Second Victim.
When a patient in injured or killed by a sentinel events, the doctor may also suffer. To download a copy of an interesting article, see:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/reprint/320/7237/726
When I saw this article I thought it was new. Then I looked at the date at the bottom of the page. The article was from 2000! That made me think …
What has actually changed in the past 7 years in the efforts to achieve greater patient safety and quality of care? Have most of our solutions just been “band-aids”? Have we really made significant change in the reporting, root cause analysis, and correction of the causes of medical errors across the industry?
What do you think? Click on the title word “comment” below to leave your ideas…
September 25th, 2007 at 7:06 am
The situation is getting steadily worse because US Healthcare facilities simply refuse to acknowledge the single most deadly causative factor in the dramatic increase of Medical Errors: “Deliberate Negligent Understaffing!” While unnecessarily top heavy Management continues to promote the toxic work environment of chronic fatigue through understaffing, our most precious resource, experienced Nurses, will continue their relentless exodus. We do not have a Nursing Crisis in the US we have a Nursing Exodus which means that, yes we can lure qualified Nurses back into bedside Nursing if we make a conscious effort to CONTROL UNDERSTAFFING TODAY, as suggested in the C..U.T! Campaign Goals on the new WordPress Blog for TRANSPARENCY for EQUAL ACCOUNTABILITY in MEDICINE; Please visit: http://medteam.wordpress.com/
If Hospital Management continues to placate Corporate interests at the expense of safe patient care by refusing to address these priorities all of their so called “Patient Safety Initiatives” are absolutely worthless: they are just “Rearranging the Deckchairs on the Titanic!” How can staff possibly remain fully prepared to cope with a serious disaster or terrorist emergency, when every single day of work the allocated personnel for shift coverage relies on emergency staffing resources? http://medteam.wordpress.com/tag/disaster-preparedness/
Many of the proposed Patient Safety Initiatives actually increase paperwork, adding tedious crosschecks and procedures that there is just no spare time to complete with grossly fatigued, overstretched, overstressed staff. These measures are very valid, but totally imposible to implement in the current work environment with minimal staff and an unhealthy reliance on Nursing Agency temps. Why are Hospital bugs and secondary infections rampant? Hygiene is cursory due to lack of staff, poor supervision and zero training, plus sick Hospital staff are pressured into working while they are still sick. Our Doctors in training do not have the support of a vigilant team; all too often they are exploited as a cheap labor source burdened with menial tasks as they pick up the slack for missing workers.
There are many valid ideas emerging on Wikis and Healthcare Blog sites like: http://wellness.wikispaces.com
http://kim-team.wikispaces.com/ http://medteam.wordpress.com/category/an-innovative-solution/
Please visit the T.E.A.M. Blog created as a “Take Action” site focusing on Healthcare where you will find additional Links.