Safer Hospital Care

According to the National Patient Safety Foundation, about 440,000 deaths from hospital mistakes are expected in 2018. These mistakes are preventable, but the number of deaths has been increasing for the last two decades instead of decreasing. This book describes how to prevent deaths at very low cost and get very high return on investment (ROI). The unique feature of this book is that it teaches the tools of innovation that anyone can master. It teaches healthcare staff how to manage innovation efficiently and quickly, because each patient life is critical. This second edition points out why the present methods are ineffective and shows how to find elegant solutions that are simple, comprehensive, and produce high return on investments. The second edition contains all updated material with the addition of a new chapter on systems engineering for robust improvements, a practice that has been applied in most high-risk industries, such as aerospace, defense, and NASA, for years. It aims at redesigning systems to make sure right things, right coordination and right integration happens in healthcare systems.

Dev Raheja, MS, CSP, is an international risk management and quality assurance consultant for the healthcare, medical device, and aerospace industry for more than 25 years. He trains and shows how to come up with elegant design solutions using creativity and innovation. He served as Associate Professor at University of Maryland for its graduate degree program in Reliability Engineering. he currently serves as Adjunct Professor for it Mechanical Engineering Department. Prior to becoming a consultant in 1982, he worked at GE Healthcare as supervisor of quality assurance and manager of manufacturing, and at Booz-Allen & Hamilton as risk management consultant for nuclear and mass transportation industry. He has done consulting and training for the Army, Navy, Air Force, NASA, Boeing, Lockheed, BAE Aerospace, and commercial industries in over 20 countries including Australia, Japan, UK, France, Germany, Turkey, Finland, Norway and Brazil.

Acknowledgment. About the Author. Introduction. 1 The Etiologies of Unsafe Healthcare. 2 Sufficient Understanding Is a Prerequisite to Safe Care. 3 Preventing "Indifferencity" to Enhance Patient Safety. 4 Continuous Innovation Is Better Than Continuous Improvement. 5 Innovations Should Start with Incidence Reports. 6 Doing More with Less Is Innovation. 7 Reinvent Quality Management. 8 Reinvent Risk Management. 9 Human Errors May Be Unpreventable; Preventing Harm Is an Innovation. 10 Managing Safety: Lessons from Aerospace. 11 The Paradigm Pioneers. 12 Protect Patients from Dangers in Medical Devices. 13 Heuristics for Continuous Innovation. 14 Aequanimitas-The Best-Known Strategy for Safe Care. 15 Healthcare Systems Engineering: the Powerful Quality Improvement Tool. Appendix A: Swiss Cheese Model for Error Trapping. Index