Straight talk: rural hospitals take steps to improve patient safety
In health care, poor communication and lack of teamwork can be catastrophic.
But, Katherine Jones, Ph.D., knows that simple steps -- clear goals, defined roles and responsibilities, empowered employees and objective feedback -- can drastically improve outcomes.
More than 70 percent of medical errors can be traced to system problems in the delivery of health care. In spite of this finding, health care professionals receive little, if any, formal training in systems thinking, or teamwork and communication skills.
“Health care professionals need to be as just as competent in teamwork and communication skills as they are in their clinical skills,” said Dr. Jones, a health services researcher and physical therapist.
Beginning in April 2008, Dr. Jones and her team have trained more than half of Nebraska’s 65 critical access hospitals in TeamSTEPPS, an evidence-based program that improves communication and teamwork skills among health care professionals.
“UNMC has played a huge role in improving the patient safety infrastructure in our rural hospitals,” she said.
People strive to do their best, Dr. Jones said, but in some cases the system is predisposed to error and the culture discourages employees from speaking up to advocate for patients. “We need organizations with people who have been trained in how errors occur and who understand the role of the system in causing errors,” she said.
As she travels the state, her UNMC colleague, Connie Miller, Ph.D., shares similar lessons on campus with the next generation of nurses.
Each hospital that participates in the national program receives tools and strategies to enhance its performance and patient safety. They also report errors in a non-punitive setting, which lets hospital personnel make sense of the role of system breakdowns in medical errors, Dr. Jones said.
"We emphasize that reporting an error or safety event isn't about an individual person, but about improving the entire health care system," she said.
And that is good news for all of us.
