These realities and changes are not without their costs, namely tension within individual systems of care that unfortunately can pose greater risk to patients. Researchers and providers alike argue that our standards of care are not being met and that important work lies ahead for the realization of these standards (Amalberti & Vincent, 2020). This basic-level course focuses on five major components of the problem of medical error for behavioral health professionals. The first section describes the severity of the problem of medical error in the U.S. and outlines the evolution of the patient safety movement. The second section introduces concepts from human factors research that are essential to understanding the complexity of patient
safety, and also outlines the importance of a culture of safety. The third section presents three basic strategies to reduce harm: Safety briefings, root cause analysis, and full disclosure. A fourth section addresses three error-prone situations that are common in behavioral health settings: Inadequate assessment of suicide risk, failure to comply with mandatory reporting laws, and failure to detect medical conditions that have psychological symptoms. The final section describes the psychosocial needs of survivors of medical error and their families. This course is intended for social workers, mental health counselors, marriage and family therapists, psychologists, and advanced practice and psychiatric nurses.
EVOLUTION OF THE PATIENT SAFETY MOVEMENT
Researchers have been tracking death and serious injury to patients in the U.S. healthcare system for more than 50 years. As early as the 1970s, anesthesiologists began applying scientific approaches to their work in an attempt to reduce harm to their patients. Despite these efforts, it was not until the 1990s that the patient safety movement was launched. Early in that decade, a study of medical records revealed that almost 4% of hospitals in the state of New York had experienced an adverse event, which is defined as an unintended injury caused by healthcare management rather than the patient’s disease and which may result in a longer hospital stay, temporary or permanent disability, or death (Vincent & Amalberti, 2015). Historically, negligent care has remained a chronic problem with our healthcare system. Before The Joint Commission took action in 1997, The Report: To Err Is Human In 1999, the secrecy surrounding medical errors was broken when the Institute of Medicine (IOM; now the National Academy of Medicine) published To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System. The report captured worldwide attention, and efforts to address the problem began in earnest. This signature report called for an increase in national awareness, namely research, practice, training, and collaboration to reduce the incidence of accidental harm to patients (Bates & Singh, 2018; Mueller et al., 2019, Oster & Braaten, 2021). Although the report focused on hospitals, the IOM’s definition of a medical error—the failure of a planned action to be completed as intended or the use of the wrong plan to achieve an aim—is as relevant to behavioral health settings as to medical settings. The report recounted two separate studies that documented as few as 44,000 and as many as 98,000 deaths annually from preventable medical accidents. More recent studies have estimated numbers between 210,000 and 400,000 according to data extracted from inpatient health and medical records (Makary & Daniel, 2016; Panagioti et al., 2019). Even at the low end, these figures placed preventable medical accidents as the eighth leading cause of death in the U.S.—ahead of car crashes (43,000 deaths annually), breast cancer (42,300 deaths annually), and AIDS (16,516 deaths annually). These IOM statistics did not include deaths in ambulatory care settings, behavioral health facilities, or long-term care settings, and they did not account for hospital-acquired infections. When the number of deaths resulting from these causes is added, preventable
several dramatic cases captured our collective attention to reveal systemic inadequacies. These widely publicized incidents involved a seven-year-old Florida boy who died after receiving the wrong anesthesia for minor surgery, a Massachusetts healthcare columnist who died from a chemotherapy overdose, a Florida man who had the wrong leg amputated, and an infant in Texas who died from a drug overdose. Coming one right after the other, these tragedies jolted the healthcare community into action. In 1997, The Joint Commission began to require all healthcare organizations participating in its accreditation program to have a process in place for analyzing sentinel events and created a voluntary reporting program to gather information and increase knowledge about sentinel events (The Joint Commission, 2012). harm to patients in the U.S. healthcare system jumps to the third leading cause of death (Makary & Daniel, 2016). To achieve safer care, the IOM cautioned that American medicine would have to look beyond its traditional knowledge base and learn from other disciplines, such as engineering, as well as other high-risk industries, such as aerospace and aviation (Oster & Braaten, 2021). The report introduced concepts that have the potential to transform healthcare’s approach to patient safety. ● Most harm to patients occurs because of flaws in the system, not because of individual performance. ● Harm will be reduced only as safer systems of care are designed. ● For safer systems of care to be designed, the culture of healthcare must change. Mark Chassin, an author of the 1999 report, suggests that hospitals and healthcare systems have made critical efforts in the past two decades to reduce the incidence of unintended harm to patients. However, Chassin (2019) maintains that the “one size fits all” approach to systemic change will not be realistic for widespread adoption. In order to elevate the patient safety movement, particularly over the next two decades, the author went on to suggest three areas of critical focus. ● Focus on zero harm ● Commit to restructuring organizational culture for uninhibited reporting of safety problems ● Incorporate process enhancement approaches that use Six Sigma, change management, and lean principles 2020). It assumes that humans are fallible, and errors are to be expected, even in the best organizations. The underlying premise of the systems approach is that the human condition (namely, that human beings are fallible and make mistakes) cannot be changed.
CLIENT SAFETY & HARM REDUCTION
The error and safety movement has moved toward new concepts, including the idea that incidents of nonserious harm should not be minimized and that these nonserious incidents have the unfortunate potential to become serious incidents that lead to significant patient harm (Young et al.,
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Book Code: PCUS1525
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