Frontline Health Workers and the Movement for Patient Safety
By Mary Beth Powers, Chair of the Frontline Health Workers Coalition
This week is Patient Safety Week – not widely recognized YET –but perhaps it should be…
I had the opportunity to join the Patient-Safety Summit organized by the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Health Care (http://www.masimofoundation.com ) in January of 2013. I have to say that I was personally a bit shocked by what I learned – though it was not a surprise to the hundreds of experts assembled from WHO, hospital networks in North America, medical device and records companies and patient advocates – there are approximately 250,000 deaths each year in the United States due to errors in patient management at facilities across the country. This makes medical error as a cause of death more common than traffic accidents – it is the 3rd most common cause of death in the United States after cancer and heart disease. These errors include failure to correctly diagnose or monitor life-threatening conditions, and stem sometimes from failures of communication between the wide variety of equipment intended in fact to assist health workers in managing their patients. You can learn more about the issue at http://www.marketplace.org/topics/life/health-care/how-fix-hospital-horror-stories-start-icu
The goal of the summit was to encourage health professional teams, manufacturers of medical devices and equipment, and developers of electronic medical records to break down their protective siloes and work more closely together to share data, solutions, and technology fixes that would reduce the kinds of lapses that result in unnecessary patient deaths. Panels includes experts from the WHO, Johns Hopkins University, University of Michigan, Mayo Clinic, and Vanderbilt University on a variety of topics including the roles and responsibilities of nurses, and neonatal care advances to reduce the huge burden of newborn deaths. You can learn more by taking a look at the home site of the summit, www.patientsafetysummit.org and you can make a pledge how you will improve patient safety and work with others to do so.
I was struck by one theme that ran through the conference – the importance of collaboration. All of us who work with health workers know that it is often not the work of any one individual health worker– health workers often perform their work in TEAMS. When we talk about frontline health workers, we are typically looking at the team of those who work most closely with the community and deliver care, using the best supplies, equipment and information that they have available and their best judgment on how to deliver needed care given the circumstances. Mobile technologies and internet connectivity are creating virtual teams alongside real teams on the ground in the countries where we work so that fewer and fewer health workers are laboring alone without some type of regular supportive supervision. Yet, there is much to be done so that health workers in both sophisticated health systems here in the United States and health workers working with only a fraction of the monitoring and medical devices that we have, can feel confident that they are protecting their patients from unnecessary complications and even death.
At the close of the conference, a reception celebrated the new partnerships toward the goal of ZERO preventable patient deaths by 2020, and was the chance to announce the first ever REAL Awards for Health Workers - heroes who are on the frontlines of care giving in the USA and around the globe. Joe Kiani, CEO of Masimo Corporation and President Bill Clinton both remarked on the importance of celebrating the work of health workers that every day toil to improve human health. You can see a bit about all of the REAL Awards winners for 2013 at www.theREALawards.com and hear more from President Bill Clinton’s speech at the Patient Safety Summit at http://patientsafetysummit.org/2013/video-presentations.aspx .
There is much to be done to improve the quality of care in our work around the world and frontline health workers play a key role by reducing the chances of infection, diagnosing and referring complications, and doing their part to reduce threats that can emerge during provision of basic health care services. The Frontline Health Workers Coalition, through the REAL Awards, plans to continue to celebrate individuals and teams of health workers who are improving patient outcomes and health wherever they work.