Zero Harm: How to Achieve Patient and Workforce Safety in Healthcare

by Craig Clapper, James Merlino, Carole Stockmeier

From the nation’s leading experts in healthcare safety―the first comprehensive guide to delivering care that ensures the safety of patients and staff alike. One of the primary tenets among healthcare professionals is, “First, do no harm.” Achieving this goal means ensuring the safety of both patient and caregiver. Every year in the United States alone, an estimated 4.8 million hospital patients suffer serious harm that is preventable. To address this industry-wide problem―and provide evidence-based solutions―a team of award-winning safety specialists from Press Ganey/Healthcare Performance Improvement have applied their decades of experience and research to the subject of patient and workforce safety. Their mission is to achieve zero harm in the healthcare industry, a lofty goal that some hospitals have already accomplished―which you can, too.
Combining the latest advances in safety science, data technology, and high reliability solutions, this step-by-step guide shows you how to implement 6 simple principles in your workplace.
1. Commit to the goal of zero harm. 2. Become more patient-centric. 3. Recognize the interdependency of safety, quality, and patient-centricity. 4. Adopt good data and analytics. 5. Transform culture and leadership. 6. Focus on accountability and execution. In Zero Harm , the world’s leading safety experts share practical, day-to-day solutions that combine the latest tools and technologies in healthcare today with the best safety practices from high-risk, yet high-reliability industries, such as aviation, nuclear power, and the United States military. Using these field-tested methods, you can develop new leadership initiatives, educate workers on the universal skills that can save lives, organize and train safety action teams, implement reliability management systems, and create long-term, transformational change. You’ll read case studies and success stories from your industry colleagues―and discover the most effective ways to utilize patient data, information sharing, and other up-to-the-minute technologies. It’s a complete workplace-ready program that’s proven to reduce preventable errors and produce measurable results―by putting the patient, and safety, first.

Genres: Nonfiction

320 pages, Hardcover

First published November 9, 2018

Reviews

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Somewhere at the end of the 19th century healthcare became good business for government bureaucrats. Here is a century of useless people interfering with a noble act: it isn't about human interaction anymore, it is about procedures, and lists, and everything a bureaucrat can invent to justify his obscene earnings.

[Bookspirit · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seems like a good platform to spring off for improving health care. By the end of the book however I was a bit lost - there seems to be enough to get you interested in the concepts but not enough to really guide you through and apply the completely.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book should be required reading for anyone working in Healthcare Quality, Safety, and Patient Experience. As someone with responsibilities in these areas, I think the points are well made. I also think that sensitivity to failure (the starting point of High Reliability Organization principles) should tell us that even this good summary falls short of where we would like to, and could, be.

Which is why I have some difficulty with the title, Zero Harm. Yes, we should all be reducing and eliminating harm! However, reaching zero is past the time we should be broadening our definition of harm. You’ve eliminated central line infections in the ICU? CLABSI across the board is next. What about blood stream infections without central lines, that outnumber CLABSI several times over? Zero CLABSI is not harm at zero.

If you want zero harm, that’s great. Patients and providers all want this.
The next book should be how we achieved even less than the zero harm we were aiming for.

Let’s do it!

[Shreya · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting read! Reminder: hospitals arent always the safest place you can be! Be your own advocate and ask every question.

[emmak]

Read for school so will not be rating.

[Ashley Holloway · Rating 2 out of 5]

had to read for a med safety rotation - insightful but repetitive with the main point