I have reviewed some of the issues related to poor discharge planning and how it can impact the outcomes of patients. Now I want to move on and discuss ways to improve discharge safety. Make no mistake, these things are easy to say and really hard to manage in the real world because they take…
Category: Safety Posts for patients and families
These posts focus on educating patients and families on how to better protect themselves with they are the healthcare system.
Safer Transitions: Reducing Risks in Patient Discharge Planning
Healthcare has a lot of transitions. A lot. These can occur as a handoff…when information about what is going on with a patient is passed to another provider. If one doctor goes off shift, they transfer the care of the patient to another doctor. This can also be when a patient is admitted from the…
How Cyber Breaches Impact Patient Safety
Returning to Patient Safety Concerns Based on ECRI Top 10 Lists I wasn’t sure about bringing this ECRI topic up, but in some ways we should all be thinking about how to maintain security of our various online devices. The implications of breaches of your own computers can be devastating to you personally, but in…
Challenging Age Bias in Elderly Healthcare
The recent death of my father has left me trying to understand why it felt as though we were always fighting to get his physicians to more aggressively treat him. It is hard not to feel that even previously healthy older adults often face therapeutic nihilism, inadequate pain management, and premature discussions focused on the…
Understanding Medical Gaslighting: My Father’s Story
I have spent some time thinking over the things that went wrong with my father’s most recent engagement with the healthcare system. One that he ultimately did not survive. I wrote about some of my concerns previously, but I feel that I need to come back to this topic. If you would like to get…
When Expertise Doesn’t Matter
This is not really a patient safety (or quality) story today. But it is a story of about how we might stay safe when exposed to dilemmas that need good decisions. If you are making a decision about how to fix your car, I assume that most of you want someone with expertise to provide…
Health Care Should be Better
There is a video that I use in training. It is about a woman who suffers a terrible post-operative infection that almost kills her. It reminds us that even as we try and treat and cure people, they can be harmed by our system. What is difficult to believe is that I was looking for…
Health Care Should Help, Sometimes it Fails
My father did not survive his most recent interaction with the health care system. I am not young, so you might imagine that by dad was not either. If you look back in this blog, you will see that my father suffered a cardiac arrest after he had a hospital acquired urinary track infection that…
Communication In Healthcare
As my father continues to be in the hospital, it gives me the opportunity to live the things that happen to other families and patients. I think that many physicians believe that they understand what their patients go through. I imagine that many have real empathy for what patients go through. But there is nothing…
It Has Been About Two Years….
It has been just over two years since my father went to a nursing home after months in a hospital. He had fallen and broken his kneecap. He did well after his surgery but while in acute rehabilitation he developed a urinary track infection, likely because of a bladder catheter that was placed during his…
Should it Take Courage to Write an Article?
I have been writing a fair bit about some of the many things that the VA has done for the field of healthcare and particularly quality and safety. This system is under some threat with potential cuts to staff and services. In response, some individuals in that system wrote an article and submitted it to…
Comparing Patient Outcomes: Veterans Health Administration vs. the U.S. Healthcare System
I have previously stated my bias about the healthcare that is provided by the VA to its millions of Veterans. It is not a perfect system by any means. I have yet to find a health system that is always perfect and never fails the patients it tries to serve. Certainly, my father is an…
Contributions of the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) to Patient Safety in the U.S – Part 2
Let’s continue the discussion of some of the many things that the Veterans Health Administration has done that has informed practice in Academics as well as the private sector. Below additional information outlining several more of the key initiatives, strategies, and achievement of the Veterans Health Administration. 1. High-Quality Surgical and Medical Care Surgical Excellence:…
When the Right Drug Goes to the Wrong Patient
In healthcare, precision is everything. A single mistake—administering the right medication to the wrong patient—can have devastating consequences. Despite all the advancements in electronic health records, barcoding systems, and smart infusion pumps, wrong-patient medication errors remain a persistent threat to patient safety. These are not rare occurrences or edge cases—they are real, preventable failures in our system…
Falls in Healthcare – Strategies to Improve
The challenge with trying to address falls is not that we don’t have a variety of strategies. We actually have quite a few. They range from the very simple to quite challenging and labor intensive. A variety are listed below. A few things have been a surprise to me in looking at ways to reduce…