SafetyDog

Engage the patient

In Patient Safety on March 4, 2011 at 1:35 pm

I wrote in a previous post about a UK study describing a hesitancy of patients to call out professionals on safety concerns.  Check out the website: Engaging the patient.com

Here is one of their thought provoking posts about needing to consider all the side effects of a change.  The following is about asking  patients to mark their own operative sites to prevent wrong side surgeries:

“Even well-intentioned suggestions can lead to unintended consequences. We can all agree that wrong-site surgeries are needless and tragic. But ensuring that this never happens is not as simple as it would seem. In the past, patient advocates suggested patients themselves write on the body part (say a knee) to be operated on. But these marks weren’t consistent. Did ‘X’ mark the spot? Or did ‘X’ mark the knee to be avoided? What if the markings were smudged? And the marker itself can increase the risk of infection”

Read more on their site!

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