Of Interest
The good news is that the patient safety world, both among citizen patient advocates and medical providers and institutions, is bubbling with activity. The challenging news is that there are hundreds of facets to the movement; many individuals, organizations, initiatives, and programs. The bad news is that despite all this, patient-family advocates are still required at the bedside 24/7/365, as completely vigilant as ever.
Patient Safety Organizations
An overview of patient safety can be found here on Wikipedia.com
The Iris Project Jennifer Ballentine’s site is one of Colorado’s go-to sources for advance directive issues both practical and legal.
The Lown Institute is Dr. Bernard Lown’s activist organization taking on medical overuse, underuse, and misuse.
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) is an influential US leader in patient safety initiatives. Don Berwick, it’s founder and initial CEO, is a former Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)
Blogs / Voices
I value most those people who have given great thought to the troubles we face and offer new ways of thinking and speaking. This helps us get our heads screwed on straight so that we lose little if any time when we need to spring into action.
Foremost among them is Joel Selmeier and his site Patient Driven Medicine. Joel is a compelling and fascinating read.
Next is James Leonard Park’s extensive thinking on medical ethics and human dying. Access it from his philosophy homepage. Perhaps extensive to a fault but completely worth investigating and pondering.
Every Patient’s Advocate Trisha Torrey has long been a wide-ranging voice for patient advocacy. In addition to her blog she writes extensively at About.com .
Not Running a Hospital, Paul Levy (formerly titled Running a Hospital) Paul Levy is the former CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital in Boston, MA. He shares thoughts about hospitals, medicine, healthcare, transparency, and patient safety. Mostly tangential to our focus here but it’s interesting to peruse occasionally since Paul took a failing hospital back to health while transparently publishing its medical error statistics monthly on its website during his tenure.
Articles
A Tale of Two Cows: Why We Have a Cow Map and Not a Healthcare-Acquired-Infection Map
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