First, do less harm
Subtitle: confronting the inconvenient problems of patient safety
By: edited by Ross Koppel and Suzanne Gordon
Series: The culture and politics of health care work; Culture and politics of health care work
Publisher: ILR Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Ithaca
Language: eng
Number of pages: 290
ISBN-13: 9780801450778
Subjects: Safety measures; Hospital care; Medical care; Medical errors; Patients; Prevention
Description: Each year, hospital-acquired infections, prescribing and treatment errors, lost documents and test reports, communication failures, and other problems have caused thousands of deaths in the United States, added millions of days to patients' hospital stays, and cost Americans tens of billions of dollars. Despite (and sometimes because of) new medical information technology and numerous well-intentioned initiatives to address these problems, threats to patient safety remain, and in some areas are on the rise. In First, Do Less Harm, twelve health care professionals and researchers plus two former patients look at patient safety from a variety of perspectives, finding many of the proposed solutions to be inadequate or impractical. Several contributors to this book attribute the failure to confront patient safety concerns to the influence of the "market model" on medicine and emphasize the need for hospital-wide teamwork and greater involvement from frontline workers (from janitors and aides to nurses and physicians) in planning, implementing, and evaluating effective safety initiatives.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The data model that nearly killed me / Joseph M. Bugajski; title: Too mean to clean : how we forgot to clean our hospitals / Rosalind Stanwell-Smith; title: What goes without saying in patient safety / Suzanne Gordon and Bonnie O'Connor; title: Health care information technology to the rescue / Ross Koppel ... [et al.]; title: A day in the life of a nurse / Kathleen Burke; title: Excluded actors in patient safety / Peter Lazes, Suzanne Gordon, and Sameh Samy; title: Nursing as patient safety net : systems issues and future directions / Sean Clarke; title: Physicians, sleep deprivation, and safety / Christopher P. Landrigan; title: Sleep-deprived nurses : sleep and schedule challenges in nursing / Alison M. Trinkoff and Jeanne Geiger-Brown; title: Wounds that don't heal : nurses' experience with medication errors / Linda A. Treiber and Jackie H. Jones; title: On teams, teamwork, and team intelligence / Suzanne Gordon; title: Conclusion : twenty-seven paradoxes, ironies, and challenges of patient safety / Ross Koppel, Suzanne Gordon, and Joel Leon Telles.