Pathfinders are urgently needed! Flashback to 1914 and glimpse a slice of history that brings perspective to clinical leadership today. Let’s see what we can take away from a quick journey in time. Consider the Landscape One hundred years ago, it was early in the Great War, a time when everyone believed the war would be short-lived, and they would be returning to a world as they knew it. The brutal reality began to unfold daily, until more than five million people died. By the war’s end, 13 million people had been wounded. Despite the incomprehensible agony and chaos of WWI, there were … [Read more...]
No Man is an Island…Analogy for Safety
It is devastating when we make a mistake that causes harm while caring for patients. Clinicians are human and humans make mistakes. This is the very big “elephant in the room” of Patient Safety. Stories about these errors, and infections are often heart wrenching. Some clinicians who were so devastated by a mistake have left their practice. Patients talk about these issues and share their stories more than ever. The Walking Gallery uses art to bridge the gap between patients’ experiences and the industry that cares for them. We can learn from every story. Poetry as a Teacher I am reminded … [Read more...]
Patient Engagement and Patient Safety: Are They Just Words?
The words, “patient engagement” and “patient safety” seem like common sense in healthcare. However, if you are a professional caring for patients today you can certainly identify with Eliza Doolittle’s lament in My Fair Lady. “Words, words, words! I’m so sick of words I get words all day through First from him, now from you Is that all you blighters can do?” Patients and families are equally peppered with these terms on information sheets, brochures, videos and media reports. The latter are often headlines that depict a collapse in patient safety where someone suffers or dies as … [Read more...]
Engaged Patients, A Buzzword or Reality?
You are busy clinicians practicing in a hospital today and this term “patient engagement” is driving a lot of discussion and initiatives to demonstrate your patients are “engaged”. In fact, you are indirectly measured on this in the HCAPS. I would like to challenge the use of the term because it has no standard definition in healthcare, which means it is being driven by individual perceptions. Let’s visualize how this could play out in a cartoon like, Calvin and Hobbs or The Far Side. Calvin tells his pal Hobbs, “The doctor said my gage ended but I didn’t have a gage did I?” or Gary Larson’s … [Read more...]
Do Patients Receive Full Disclosure About Medications?
This is a heavy topic for the first blog post of 2013, but I sense this issue may be nearing critical mass. Please look at the BBC article about Pharma’s lack of disclosure. Patients and clinicians are making decisions today with not just incomplete data. The Cochrance Collaborative has long called for all findings in clinical trials to be made available. When only positive results are published the bias is obvious. How else can we know the full context of drugs that are on the market? But we do not know because full disclosure is not common practice from the pharmaceutical industry. … [Read more...]