Welcome back guest blogger, Anita Finkelman, author of Quality Improvement: A Guide for Integration in Nursing, for a new post in the Finding Your Way in Continuous Quality Improvement series.
On November 11 2016, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) published an interview with a video of Donald Berwick, MD, who is one of our experts in quality care. The interview is entitled: To Me, Safety Fatigue Would Be Like Breathing Fatigue or Heart Beat Fatigue.
Topics: Anita Finkelman, quality improvement, Finding your Way in Continuous Quality Improvement
Please welcome guest blogger, Anita Finkelman, author of Quality Improvement: A Guide for Integration in Nursing, for a new series on quality improvement.
A Beginning: Our Blog
Welcome to the blog Finding your Way in Continuous Quality Improvement! I am going to refer to “quality improvement” as CQI (continuous quality improvement). Upfront, let’s recognize that not only is healthcare a mixed up, changing area but so is CQI—and a new area. I like to use Alice in Wonderland as a background setting to set my mind around the topic of CQI. Why Alice? It actually is not an uncommon source used in leadership and management, but it has implications for CQI, too.
Topics: Anita Finkelman, quality improvement, Finding your Way in Continuous Quality Improvement
Developing and maintaining a culture of quality is essential to effective health care. In fact, it can quite literally mean the difference between life and death. Back in May, Johns Hopkins Medicine released a study in the British Medical Journal suggesting that medical errors actually account for 10% of deaths in the U.S., making it the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer. Yet, errors are currently not being reported this way. In fact, NPR writes that according to the study, "no one knows the exact toll taken by medical errors." Why is this?
The Johns Hopkins study argues that the way in which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) collect "national health statistics fails to classify medical errors separately on the death certificate." As a result, the study argues, the data "doesn't capture things like communication breakdowns, diagnostic errors, and poor judgment that cost lives." According to Martin Makary, M.D., M.P.H., professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and an authority on health reform,
Topics: Anita Finkelman, New Text, nursing, quality improvement