From the AHAP blog: Is preventing wrong-site surgery rocket science?

AHAP members, I’d like to share with you a post first published over on our sister blog, the Patient Safety Monitor Blog.

A very interesting article by Kaiser Health News, in collaboration with The Washington Post, focuses on the fact that despite Universal Protocol®, there is no evidence that wrong-site, wrong-procedure, or wrong-patient surgeries have decreased over the years.

President of Joint Commission Mark Chassin told Kaiser Health News that he’d argue solving the problem “really is rocket science” despite earlier widespread opinion that simple checklists and timeouts would work against mistakes. It seems that it’s not necessarily that checklists and timeouts don’t work; it’s that they exist in a system and culture that is not conducive to using them. Cassin blames, in part, a healthcare system that puts more emphasis on OR turnover than flawless patient safety. Another large part of the problem is cultural, said Peter Provonost, a prominent safety expert and medical director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Innovation in Quality Patient Care. Physicians are not expected nor taught to follow rules like other staff.

Click here to read more of the post on the AHAP blog.