Patient Safety on the Wane? (Elizabeth Hofheinz @ OTW)
When Dr. James Herndon, a former president of the AAOS and Chairman Emeritus of orthopedics at Harvard, had surgery recently, he wasn’t taking any chances. A resident came in and did the “sign your site” drill, at which point Dr. Herndon said, “Go get the surgeon…I want his signature too.”
Why the extreme caution? Because Dr. Herndon has the facts. And the overarching, disturbing fact is that patient safety among orthopedic surgery residencies has declined. Dr. Herndon, whose article on this topic was recently published in theJournal of Bone and Joint Surgery, explains, “We surveyed 169 residents and found that despite having been exposed to formal educational events on safety in the last ten years, the patient safety climate has decreased. Unfortunately, the culture of many hospitals is such that they don’t want to recognize mistakes. Couple that with the fact that most doctors don’t believe that near misses and mistakes are as common as they are, and the fact that people don’t often recall their mistakes, and you have a good picture of the challenge we’re up against.”
To assess the status of safety, Dr. Herndon...
