Health Care Professionals Take Action

Healthcare Professionals
Take Action.

Like the Institute of Medicine, the World Health Organization and the leading experts on human error and organizational performance, Project Patient Care approaches the healthcare sector’s failure to produce consistent, reliably high quality care as a systems issue. We know patient harm almost never is intentional and that laying fault at the feet of healthcare workers almost always is a simplistic excuse. Human factors experts teach that no other human activity is as complex, dynamic and difficult to manage as healthcare is. The failures go beyond what are normally seen as “human errors” to encompass fundamental defectss in the design and structure of everyday healthcare work.

These problems are often latent in our healthcare organizations and work processes. They don’t become visible to those involved until just the right conditions combine to produce an injury or potential injury. And then the root causes are often hard to distinguish, because there is seldom just one. Fatigue combined with a shift change and a broken piece of equipment or a lost test result – that’s a typical recipe for error in healthcare.

Yet healthcare professionals can improve safety and quality if we commit to sharing lessons learned when error occurs or almost occurs. The stories of healthcare professionals – doctors, nurses and all others – are treasure.

Share Your Story

We have so much to learn from you. And with the establishment by Congress of Patient Safety Organizations (PSO), reports you make though your healthcare organization are fully protected by federal law. They cannot be used for disciplinary purposes and they must be de-identified before being analyzed. These new protections for reporters to a PSO are much more extensive than those previously available under Illinois State law.

Every health care provider who has witnessed a safety or quality incident can share it with Project Patient Care’s PSO. Please share now or talk to your organization’s patient safety officer about joining the Project Patient Care PSO. Share Now.

Join Today

Healthcare workers are people who care about doing their best. And we often are healthcare consumers ourselves or the carer for a patient in our family or among our friends. Membership in Project Patient Care is free. Your membership is critical to demonstrating that patient safety and quality improvement are issues of primary importance in Chicagoland. Your membership will give a stronger voice to this issue, amplifying its urgency and our purpose. As a member will be kept informed of latest news, seminars, symposiums, webinars and accomplishments. Join Now.

Donate Today

Patient safety has not had the attention it requires. We need your support to build a comprehensive, collaborative, results-driven effort. Project Patient Care is a non-profit organization. Your tax-deductible donation is an important way of underscoring your commitment to patient safety in Chicago. Every donation matters. Donate Now.

Spread the word

We need your help in educating Chicagoland about Project Patient Care and the issue of patient safety and quality health care. Tell colleagues about our effort. Spread the word.

You are part of the solution

Health care professionals are “human factors” functioning in complex organizations and, like everyone else, we have certain cognitive processes that can contribute to error. We are, for example, more prone to make mistakes when tired, distracted or climbing the learning curve on a new skill or process. But research has shown that system improvements can reduce failurerates and improve the quality of health care:

  • A 1999 study indicated that including a pharmacist on medical rounds reduced the errors related to medication ordering by 66 percent, from 10.4 per 1,000 patient days to 3.5 per 1,000 patient days.
  • The specialty of anesthesia has reduced its error rate by nearly sevenfold, from 25 to 50 per million to 5.4 per million, by using standardized guidelines and protocols, standardizing equipment, etc.
  • The evidence is mounting that teamwork training and devices such as SBAR either prevent human errors or help workers quickly recover from them, often in time to avoid bad treatment outcomes.