American Anesthesiology says it has found the secret to turning any operating room into a high reliability organization (HRO) focused on safety.
The steps, recounted in an article in Becker's Infection Control and Clinical Quality, include:
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Empower champions to advocate for patient safety. Train those champions in leadership development and change management and give them hands-on practice in advocacy.
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Have the advocates train the rest of the OR team in developing a safety-first culture in which team members are not penalized for speaking up on safety.
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Give the OR team the right tools to improve safety. Examples cited included an app in which safety concerns can be reported electronically, and a checklist used when handing off a patient to post-operative care.
American Anesthesiology, a division of MEDNAX, plans to roll out its HRO Patient Safety Initiative at about one-third of its 29 anesthesiology practices by the end of the year, according to the article.
The stakes are high. A study published last year in the Journal of Patient Safety found that medical errors lead to the deaths of as many as 400,000 patients per year--much higher than the 98,000 estimated by the 1999 Institute of Medicine report "To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System."
Other approaches to improving OR safety include a black box that identifies when errors occur during surgery. The black box films the procedures and records conversations and metrics of the OR environment, providing a record that can help identify how errors lead to adverse event, researchers said. Communication is key as well, with researchers finding that thorough OR briefings and debriefings that include a discussion of relevant information about the procedure can improve outcomes.
For more information:
-here's the Becker's article