Earlier this year, our hospital staff was weighing a new 24/7 family presence policy to allow immediate family members to stay with patients 24 hours a day. We knew this was a step in the direction of delivering patient- and family-centered care.
We presented the proposal at a meeting of our patient and family advisory council. One of the members of the council told a story that drove home the importance …
Recently in one of the Johns Hopkins Hospital’s intensive care units, a patient was dying from cancer and sepsis, and there was nothing that I, nurse Mandy Schwartz or anyone else could do to stop it. Yet as the patient’s family — two daughters and a husband — suffered at her bedside, Mandy saw their need for comfort, and she responded. Although she was busy with nursing tasks, she delved …
The doughnut shop I pass on my drive to the hospital isn’t the kind of place where you might expect to see outpourings of random kindness. It sits in the shadow of a raised highway, a few doors down from a bail bond business and a block away from a prison complex that resembles a medieval castle.
One Sunday before Valentine’s Day, the line to get served there was long, checkered …
Recently, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued two reports that are simultaneously scary and encouraging.
First, the scary news: A national survey conducted in 2011 found that one in every 25 U.S. hospital patients experienced a healthcare-associated infection. That’s 648,000 patients with a combined 722,000 infections. About 75,000 of those patients died during their hospitalizations, although it’s unknown how many of those deaths resulted from the …
One of the most exciting things about working in patient safety and health care quality is that it’s not solely about advancing science or applying performance improvement methods. It is also about the excitement of being part of a social movement that is changing the culture of medicine — putting patients at the center of everything, sharing errors in the hopes of preventing future ones, and confronting hierarchies that stifle …
Frontline caregivers across the United States — and in many other countries, no doubt — are bombarded by multiple quality improvement (QI) projects. A clinical unit might simultaneously be engaged in efforts to reduce readmissions, eliminate hospital-acquired infections and other complications, increase hand-hygiene compliance, improve performance on core measures, and enhance the patient experience. The demands brought by participating in all of these efforts risk overwhelming health care professionals, who …
Last fall, the Armstrong Institute, along with our partners at the World Health Organization, had the privilege of hosting more than 200 clinicians, patient advocates, health care leaders and policy makers for our inaugural Forum on Emerging Topics in Patient Safety in Baltimore.
The event featured presentations by international experts in a dozen different industries, including aviation safety expert Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, a former space shuttle commander and the chief …
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