BrianStar.com

Posts Tagged ‘Administration Handbook’

This topic is relatively new and a bit controversial because it’s a delicate situation when dealing with patient safety and possible repercussions. The groundwork for Medical Error Best Practice was laid at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky (Patient Safety Program) and calls for the immediate reporting to risk management of an error in care.

According to the Veterans Health Administration handbook “The Patient Safety Program’s goal is to prevent harm to patients. This is accomplished by taking steps in the way things are done so that the level of faith and trust in the VHA patient safety system is established, and behaviors designed to prevent adverse events become a part of all employee behavior. NOTE: This is a never-ending process. In this way a “culture of safety” can be formed.”

The principle of this method is for the health care professional who committed the error, to apologize to the patient, and when befitting, rectification is offered.

Chief Risk Officer Richard Botthman of the University of Mishigan Health System in Ann Arbor said the entity implemented its program of declaration of wrong doing and compensation for medical errors a decade ago.

With the new structure of the program in place, the hospital found the approach resulted in “a decrease in new legal claims (including the number of new lawsuits per month), time to claim resolution and total liability costs” in 2007 compared with 1995 as outlined in a study printed in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The US Department of Veterans Affairs states that the VA’s National Center for Patient Safety (NCPS) was established in 1999 to develop and nurture a culture of safety throughout the Veterans Health Administration.

The VA has a website dedicated to patient safety with many resources readily available to the public and health care professionals. The National Center for Patient Safety

It remains to be seen if this model will work on a large scale, or if hospitals in general will be willing to adopt this doctrine. The traditional thought is that if a doctor assumes guilt, they can also assume that they are going to be sued. With continued testing and trial by hospitals such as the VA should prove to rub off on some of the other institutions who are truely interested in an outstanding level of patient care.