Healthcare providers know that the public is invested in the reporting of and the prevention of medical errors. The website Dead by Mistake is run by Hearst newspapers and is a consumer oriented site with scary stories of medical mishaps that would make even the bravest among us afraid to receive hospital care.
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Archive for October, 2010|Monthly archive page
Dead by Mistake
In High Reliability Orgs, hospital, Patient Safety, safety, Safety climate on October 29, 2010 at 8:03 pmTeam Up! with Patients!
In Patient Safety on October 28, 2010 at 8:46 pm
Everyone’s Opinion Matters
In Patient Safety on October 26, 2010 at 10:12 pmAnother great post from IOatWORK.
This one reviews an article about minority opinion expression in teams.
One dynamic of high performing teams is that everyone’s opinion is heard. This is an important concept for any organization developing teams to work on safety initiatives.
http://www.ioatwork.com/ioatwork/2010/10/minority-opinions-a-vital-role-in-team-success.html
Let Employees Solve Problems
In Patient Safety, Root cause analysis, Safety climate on October 25, 2010 at 9:57 pmExcerpt from Harvard Business School working Knowledge:
“A Harvard research team recently set out to better understand what managers can do to encourage employees to speak up about problems, and to investigate how managers can encourage employees to offer solutions.
The team’s working paper, “Speaking Up Constructively: Managerial Practices that Elicit Solutions from Front-Line Employees” considers data on nearly 7,500 incidents from a single hospital to determine whether two types of managerial actions increase the frequency with which frontline workers speak up by reporting incidents and do so constructively by including solutions in their incident reports”
Please read their article: View full post
Read Speaking up constructively linked from that post
2010 SIOP Leading Edge Consortium (LEC)
In I-O Psychology, Patient Safety, Safety climate, Teamwork on October 22, 2010 at 12:46 pmIt is 88 degrees in Tampa as day one kicks off for the SIOP LEC on Developing and Enhancing High Performance Teams.
The amazing speakers: I will list their names and content and the thoughts they have provoked in me from a safety dog perspective.
Gary Latham the co-chair of the LEC gave an inspiring introduction about the purpose of these LECs as not only to hear great speakers but also to compare notes as practitioners. more: Read the rest of this entry »
Safety comes in Teams
In Teamwork on October 19, 2010 at 9:49 pmFrom the Human Factors Advocate:
1.Shared cognition matters in team performance.
2.Shared cognition can be measured.
3.Team training promotes teamwork and enhances team performance.
4.Synthetic task environments (STEs) provide context for research.
5.Team performance can be modeled.
6.Factors that influence team performance have been identified.
7.Well-designed technology can improve team performance.
8.The field belongs to many disciplines.
To read more go to The Human Factor Advocate:
History of motion studies
In I-O Psychology on October 17, 2010 at 12:21 pmOne way to help create safety in the environment is to look at the system through motion studies. These can be of staff or of patients. Some of the earliest motion studies were done in the early 1900s by the husband and wife team of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. The Gilbreths were the inspiration for the characters in the movie and novel, Cheaper by the Dozen.
You can watch some of the Gilbreths’ early motion study videos here
Just wait until next week!
In I-O Psychology, Patient Safety, Teamwork on October 12, 2010 at 9:27 pmI won’t have much to say this week as I am just starting back to class. This semester I am taking Psychology of Organizational Ergonomics in the Workplace.
Next week however, I will be live-blogging from sunny Florida at the LEC (Leading Edge Consortium). This year’s topics center around developing and enhancing high performance teams.
I am particularly excited to hear presentations particular to healthcare from:
•Heidi King, Dept of Defense Patient Safety Program: Using Teamwork to Build a Culture of Safety in Healthcare: The DoD Journey
•Michael West, Aston University, UK: I-O Psychology in Health Care Services – the UK National Health Service.
•Eduardo Salas, University of Central Florida: Evidence-Based Solutions for Team Development: Competencies and Learning Strategies
Stay tuned!
Attach ’em!
In Human Factors, Patient Safety on October 9, 2010 at 1:54 pm
I rode by a construction site today and noticed all the jack hammer operators had helmets with noise reduction headphones and goggles secured right to their hard hats with easy flip down attachments. A great idea to combine two safety mechanisms into one product making an easier route to OSHA standards compliance.
OSHA 2002:
“Workers operating a jackhammer must wear safety glasses and
safety shoes that protect them against injury if the jackhammer slips
or falls. A face shield also should be used… Working with noisy tools such as jackhammers requires proper, effective use of appropriate hearing protection.”
OSHA 2002:
“Workers operating a jackhammer must wear safety glasses and
safety shoes that protect them against injury if the jackhammer slips
or falls. A face shield also should be used… Working with noisy tools such as jackhammers requires proper, effective use of appropriate hearing protection.”
Are there products in the hospital setting that we could combine into all-in-one devices to make things safer and more available for either the patient or the staff?
Is 66 days enough?
In Checklists, Human Factors, Patient Safety, Safety climate on October 6, 2010 at 12:20 pmOne of the difficulties in infusing safety into the healthcare environment is getting safety behaviors habitually into bedside practice. The previously referenced degradation of the anesthesia safety policy published in Quality and Safety in Health Care is a perfect illustration of this dilemma. View the full text of this article The natural lifespan of a safety policy: violations and system migration in anaesthesia.
A recent experiment published in the European Journal of Social Psychology contained the results of a study focused on the length of time it took to insinuate a behavior into habit…. Read the rest of this entry »
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