Can we prevent all preventable harm?
Posted By: Scott Ragan 
Date Posted: October 6th, 2009 Category: Cost & Quality
BJC has created nine preventable harm teams who are reviewing proccesses throughout the BJC facility to determine where the potential for caregiver-induced harm can be eliminated.
Read the article below and tell me if you think we can eliminate this type of preventable harm.
http://www.ragan.com/ME2/Audiences/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=MultiPublishing&mod=PublishingTitles&mid=5AA50C55146B4C8C98F903986BC02C56&tier=4&id=0596AD8127DE460FA4C79713241946A1&AudID=3FF14703FD8C4AE98B9B4365B978201A
Comment By: Jason Vander Weele
Date & Time: October 6, 2009 at 10:37 pm
That's a sad story. The article doesn't explain the details of how or where this employee injected herself, which makes it hard to determine how to prevent it. My first reaction would be to ensure limited access to those drugs, and then look at ways to enhance surveillance of areas where this sort of thing could happen.
If the goal, at any cost, is to prevent this from happening, then having off-site medical professionals monitoring these areas via video is a possibility, or requiring 2-3 staff members be present at any time these drugs are accessed might help. Of course, that would be very costly, but does answer your question, it could allow for this preventable harm to be prevented.
Comment By: Rebekah
Date & Time: October 15, 2009 at 3:37 pm
We can only prevent what we consider. Hospitals and other healthcare institutions have many checks and safeguards in place to prevent narcotic theft by employees. We know an employee may take a drug out and replace it in the machine with another. We know they might just outright take it. But what no one has considered – what this employee thought up – was theft and replacement at point of use. Not to glorify the situation, but it was a novel approach to work around the system we have in place.
You may have heard the expression that when we make something idiot-proof, it only works till the world comes up with a smarter idiot. The same principle applies here. Until we think up every possible scenario by which we could cause harm, we cannot prevent ALL preventable harm. All we can do is keep improving as we watch the system break again and again. We MUST learn from those breaks and prevent them from happening again, but we can't always stop them from happening in the first place.
That being said, I think that these BJC teams can do a great deal of good. It would be interesting to see them include some people who HAVE caused harm, whether on purpose or by accident – on the teams in order to find out exactly how people are getting around our current safety systems and how they COULD get around other systems we may implement.
Comment By: Meg K
Date & Time: March 15, 2010 at 12:48 pm
Our very own "White Collar?"