Qual Saf Health Care
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Qual Saf Health Care · Dec 2010
Comparative StudyAdverse events and comparison of systematic and voluntary reporting from a paediatric intensive care unit.
Little is known of the incidence of adverse events in the paediatric intensive care unit (PICU). Perceived incidence may be dependent on data-collection methods. ⋯ Neither voluntary reporting nor systematic enquiry captures all adverse events. While the two methods both capture some events, systematic reporting captures serious events, while voluntary reporting captures mainly insignificant and minor events.
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Qual Saf Health Care · Dec 2010
Assessing teamwork attitudes in healthcare: development of the TeamSTEPPS teamwork attitudes questionnaire.
The report, To Err is Human, indicated that a large number of deaths are caused by medical error. A central tenet of this report was that patient safety was not only a function of sophisticated healthcare technology and treatments, but also the degree to which healthcare professionals could perform effectively as teams. Research suggests that teamwork comprises four core skills: Leadership, Situation Monitoring, Mutual Support and Communication. In healthcare, team training programmes, such as TeamSTEPPS®, are designed to improve participant knowledge of, attitudes towards, and skills in these core areas. If such training programmes are effective, changes in knowledge, attitudes and skills should be observed. The purpose of this study was to develop and validate the TeamSTEPPS Teamwork Attitudes Questionnaire (T-TAQ), a measure designed to assess attitudes towards the core components of teamwork in healthcare. ⋯ The T-TAQ provides a useful, reliable and valid tool for assessing individual attitudes related to the role of teamwork in the delivery of healthcare. Issues related to its use and interpretation are discussed.
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Qual Saf Health Care · Dec 2010
Randomized Controlled TrialTeamwork training with nursing and medical students: does the method matter? Results of an interinstitutional, interdisciplinary collaboration.
The authors conducted a randomised controlled trial of four pedagogical methods commonly used to deliver teamwork training and measured the effects of each method on the acquisition of student teamwork knowledge, skills, and attitudes. ⋯ Each of the four modalities demonstrated significantly improved teamwork knowledge and attitudes, but no modality was demonstrated to be superior. Institutions should feel free to utilise educational modalities, which are best supported by their resources to deliver interdisciplinary teamwork training.
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Although acknowledged to be an ethical imperative for providers, disclosure following patient safety incidents remains the exception. The appropriate response to a patient safety incident and the disclosure of medical errors are neither easy nor obvious. An inadequate response to patient harm or an inappropriate disclosure may frustrate practitioners, dent their professional reputation, and alienate patients. ⋯ Adopting a policy of transparency represents a major shift in organisational focus and may take several years to implement. In our experience, the ability to rapidly learn from, respond to, and modify practices based on investigation to improve the safety and quality of patient care is grounded in transparency.
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Qual Saf Health Care · Oct 2010
Comparative StudyTransitions from neonatal intensive care unit to ambulatory care: description and evaluation of the proactive risk assessment process.
Over 20,000 US neonates annually make the potentially risky transition from the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) to the care of primary care physicians whom they have never met. The authors describe the use of Health Care Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (HFMEA) to proactively assess the risks of this transition, and present a qualitative evaluation of the HFMEA process. ⋯ While HFMEA holds promise for improving the safety of care transitions, the full effort required to realise the potential benefit requires additional evaluation to confirm its value over less intensive means of achieving safer care transitions.