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WHO's Steps To Patient Safety
UPI Health Business Correspondent Washington (UPI) May 02, 2007 All countries -- from richest to poorest -- can make patients safer by following nine steps, the World Health Organization said Wednesday. "Healthcare has a ways to go in order to become a high-reliability industry," said Karen Timmons, president and CEO of Joint Commission International, a body that accredits hospitals. About 10 percent of hospital patients in the developing world are harmed by medical errors, and that figure is likely much higher in the developing world, according to WHO estimates. At any given time, about 1.4 million people worldwide are suffering from infections acquired in hospitals. For nearly the last decade, efforts have been underway in American and British hospitals to improve the safety of care patients receive, but the WHO announcement marks the first worldwide effort backed by such an influential organization. The newly released steps range from basics like making sure hands are washed and needles are not reused, to more involved issues like eliminating the confusion that results when different drugs have similar names and appearances. Healthcare workers also need to do a better job of communicating with each other when patients are handed off, the guidelines say. Patient safety is a "longstanding issue that has never been seriously addressed," said Sir Liam Donaldson, chief medical officer of England who drafted the WHO resolution that led to the guidelines. The involvement of the WHO has "raised the discussion of safety to the level of healthcare systems," Donaldson, who is also chairman of the World Alliance for Patient Safety, told United Press International. Every country should move to implement the changes, which were designed with a broad range of countries in mind, said Timmons, whose organization is part of the WHO Collaborating Center for Patient Safety Solutions, which released the nine steps. "We set out to identify common but preventable healthcare errors that are prevalent in hospitals around the world," she said. Healthcare groups from around the world helped develop the guidelines, to make sure they were both pertinent and culturally sensitive, Timmons told United Press International. Nurses in Muslim countries, for example, expressed concern over using alcohol-based rubs to sterilize their hands, because their religion prohibits the use of alcohol. Less developed countries will likely focus on simpler measures like handwashing and eliminating needle reuse, said Tebogo Kgosietsile Letlape, past-president of the World Medical Association. Those measures alone could make a huge difference in Africa, he said, where the AIDS epidemic is taking a heavy toll, and infectious diseases cause 40 percent of deaths. "The importance of handwashing is that it's accessible to everyone," Letlape said. Other countries may focus more on sophisticated methods of patient identification, like barcodes, Gary Filerman, chairman of the Georgetown University department of health systems administration, told UPI. The guidelines are timely and necessary, he said, but they also include some "wishful thinking," he said. "Some of the guidelines are more doable in some environments than others. When you move outside well-developed, industrialized countries, no country will move on all nine (guidelines) simultaneously." Still, with the weight of the international organization behind them, the guidelines could be a useful push for improvement worldwide, he said, especially when it comes to pressuring professional organizations to work on patient safety from within. "They're blowing the whistle and saying, 'Look world, we've got a problem," Filerman said. "That's a huge step forward." The recommendations are "all things U.S. hospitals are working on anyway," Nina Shik, infection control specialist at the University of Kansas Hospital, told UPI. But all nine steps are part of establishing a "culture of safety," she said, and even hand hygiene is still an issue in hospitals in wealthy countries. In an interconnected world, she added, unsafe medical care is a threat to people everywhere. "Recent events like outbreaks of SARS and the potential of pandemics has made healthcare providers aware that what happens in one country will have a wide impact," Shik said. "It's really good to see safety measures endorsed by the WHO."
Source: United Press International Related Links World Health Organization Hospital and Medical News at InternDaily.com Hospital and Medical News at InternDaily.com
Stanford Scientists Make Major Breakthrough In Regenerative Medicine
Stanford CA (SPX) Apr 25, 2007Findings described in a new study by Stanford scientists may be the first step toward a major revolution in human regenerative medicine-a future where advanced organ damage can be repaired by the body itself. In the May 2007 issue of The FASEB Journal, researchers show that a human evolutionary ancestor, the sea squirt, can correct abnormalities over a series of generations, suggesting that a similar regenerative process might be possible in people. |
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