What is the greatest threat to your health?
Cancer?
Heart Disease?
Stroke?
Some might say the greatest threat to your health is a medical error. These human and system errors are the result of a whole host of breakdowns. The impact on the patient can be minor or major with the latter resulting in a preventable death.
In November of 1999, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released the report To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System that revealed an estimated 44,000 to 98,000 preventable deaths were due to medical errors. According to the most recent data available from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), those numbers would still put medical errors as one of the Top Ten Leading Causes of Death in the U.S.
In a 2002 report published by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), it was reported that an estimated 7,000 people die each year from medication error. These findings motivated AHRQ in collaboration with the Department of Defense (DoD) to develop the evidence-based program Team Strategies & Tools to Enhance Performance & Patient Safety (TeamSTEPPS).
The program aims to optimize performance within healthcare institutions by improving teamwork and communication with the focus on increasing patient safety.
Additionally, alternate programs have been developed that center on improvement within specific areas of the healthcare system such as labor and delivery and ambulatory surgery.
Since 2005, Contrast Creative has had the privilege of working with AHRQ and its partners like Health Research Educational Trust (HRET) on producing Patient Safety Toolkits that each include a series of educational video modules. We’ve done so in successful collaboration with Dr. Karen Frush, one of the country’s thought leaders on patient safety.
In our latest video blog, Dr. Frush shares her knowledge and insight about the TeamSTEPPS program and the impact this evidence-based teamwork system, as well as other safety programs like CUSP, SUSP and CAUTI, can have on health care professionals and the patients whose lives are in their hands.
“Patients and families who come to the hospitals assume we’ll provide safe care, and that is, without question, what every doctor, every nurse wants to do,” says Frush. “We, as healthcare providers, as physicians, as nurses, can make mistakes. We make fewer mistakes and we can do a much better job if we work together as a team. And if we want to be a high-performing team, everyone on that team needs to speak up; everyone needs to contribute to our work.”
Review TeamSTEPPS in the Primary Care Setting, produced by Contrast Creative, to see an example of this program in action.