In the news: Checklist said to save lives and $ in medical errors

Jen Kirley

Quality and Auditing Expert
Staff member
Admin
#1
This news story describes results from a Harvard study in which checklists in places like operating rooms are saving lives by reducing errors.

Given the extent of my unemployment/underemployment periods and many times as I have been turned off or turned away from medical QA recruiting because I don't have a nursing degree, I feel very frutrated about this story. Get all room full of manufacturing QA managers and the roar od "DUH!" would raise the roof. Why, oh why, is it taking medicine so long to recognize what we have to offer?
:blowup:
 
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Jen Kirley

Quality and Auditing Expert
Staff member
Admin
#3
This was already highlighted HERE - probably you missed earlier :)
Doh! But I noticed that December, 2007 (!!) article didn't discuss this study, which gives outcome figures and projected cost savings...it validates the New Yorker's article. Well, for me it does.

It did help me out by explaining the cultural paradigm that stands as a barrier to improving health care quality. Here is an excerpt:
Pronovost remains, in a way, an odd bird in medical research. He does not have the multimillion-dollar grants that his colleagues in bench science have. He has no swarm of doctoral students and lab animals. He’s focussed on work that is not normally considered a significant contribution in academic medicine. As a result, few other researchers are venturing to extend his achievements. Yet his work has already saved more lives than that of any laboratory scientist in the past decade.

I called Pronovost recently at Johns Hopkins, where he was on duty in an I.C.U. I asked him how long it would be before the average doctor or nurse is as apt to have a checklist in hand as a stethoscope (which, unlike checklists, has never been proved to make a difference to patient care).

“At the current rate, it will never happen,” he said, as monitors beeped in the background. “The fundamental problem with the quality of American medicine is that we’ve failed to view delivery of health care as a science. The tasks of medical science fall into three buckets. One is understanding disease biology. One is finding effective therapies. And one is insuring those therapies are delivered effectively. That third bucket has been almost totally ignored by research funders, government, and academia. It’s viewed as the art of medicine. That’s a mistake, a huge mistake. And from a taxpayer’s perspective it’s outrageous.” We have a thirty-billion-dollar-a-year National Institutes of Health, he pointed out, which has been a remarkable powerhouse of discovery. But we have no billion-dollar National Institute of Health Care Delivery studying how best to incorporate those discoveries into daily practice.

I asked him how much it would cost for him to do for the whole country what he did for Michigan. About two million dollars, he said, maybe three, mostly for the technical work of signing up hospitals to participate state by state and coördinating a database to track the results. He’s already devised a plan to do it in all of Spain for less.

“We could get I.C.U. checklists in use throughout the United States within two years, if the country wanted it,” he said.

So far, it seems, we don’t. The United States could have been the first to adopt medical checklists nationwide, but, instead, Spain will beat us. “I at least hope we’re not the last,” Pronovost said.
Well, it's been a year and we've managed to creal out a Harvard study that validates the notion of a checklist. :rolleyes: It also projects ROI on doing it, since Pronovost claims he can establish a National Institute of Health Care Delivery for a few million bucks.
 
J

JaneB

#6
I feel very frutrated about this story. Get all room full of manufacturing QA managers and the roar od "DUH!" would raise the roof. Why, oh why, is it taking medicine so long to recognize what we have to offer?
Me too. In fact, I'm quite staggered . I had no idea that a checklist is considered such a 'radical' tool in medicine, nor that they are in such infrequent usage. :mg:

Wonder if it's the same here - I will ask around.
 
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