My favorite article about preventing patient harm through infection prevention. Filed under BEST> ARTICLE>EVER>
Infectious Risk Moments: A Novel, Human Factors–Informed Approach to Infection Prevention. Clark et all (2014)
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/677166?uid=3739696&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21104507319963
Anyone who knows me knows I love BJ Fogg’s behavior models. He is a design psychologist who runs a persuation lab out at Stanford. His latest behavior change model is based on his research about lasting change which basically falls down to: making things easy to do and changing the environment.
His latest little flip book sums up his findings to date.
Lots of lessons for us in healthcare and these are my take aways:
*we tend to love dramatic change initiatives: secret: they usually dont work
*Starter steps or baby steps arent glamorous and flashy but they work
*We clearly need to reward change and not the flashing marketing campaigns when it comes to safety (how many hours have you spent on catchy acronyms….did it make a difference??)
*BJ desribes certain things to look for that can warn you that you are designing for epiphany instead of change secret: hoping staff epiphanies will lead to behavior change doesnt usually work
If you care about patient safety AT ALL please read BJ’s latest little flipbook.. I have never read so much great info in one place
http://bjfogg.org/lastingchange/
from Propublica.org
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The health care community is not doing enough to track and prevent widespread harm to patients, and preventable deaths and injuries in hospitals and other settings will continue unless Congress takes action, medical experts said today on Capitol Hill.
“Our collective action in patient safety pales in comparison to the magnitude of the problem,” said Dr. Peter Pronovost, senior vice president for patient safety and quality at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “We need to say that harm is preventable and not tolerable.”
Dr. Ashish Jha, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, said patients are no better protected now than they were 15 years ago, when a landmark Institute of Medicine report set off alarms about deaths due to medical errors and prompted calls for reform.
“We can’t continue to have unsafe medical care be a regular part of the way we do business in health care,” Jha said.
read the full article
From a press release
“Scientists have known for many years that on-going pain in one part of the body is reduced when a new pain is inflicted to another part of the body. This pain blocking is a physiological reaction by the nervous system to help the body deal with a potentially more relevant novel threat. To explore this “pain inhibits pain” phenomenon, painful electric pulses were first administered to a subject’s foot (first pain) and the resulting pain intensity was then measured. Then the subject was asked to put their hand in a bucket of ice water (novel stimulus causing pain reduction), and as they did so, a telephone ringtone sounded in headphones. After this procedure had been repeated several times, it was observed that the pain felt from the electrical stimulation was reduced simply when the ring tone sounded.”
Raymonde Scheuren, Fernand Anton, Nathalie Erpelding, Gilles Michaux. Beep Tones Attenuate Pain following Pavlovian Conditioning of an Endogenous Pain Control Mechanism. PLoS ONE, 2014; 9 (2): e88710 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0088710
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