| CAC and Patient Safety | |
The mission of the Citizen Advocacy Center is to provide training, research, conferences and networking for health care institutions’ public members and consumer representatives. These institutions include professional licensing boards, managed care plan boards and advisory committees, Quality Improvement Organizations, and other health care oversight bodies. Created in the mid-1980s, CAC incorporated in January, 1994 as a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization. Among the key ideas promoted in by Patient Safety advocates are: (a) Patient safety is one element of quality improvement, and needs to be addressed in the context of quality improvement. (b) Patient safety requires the total commitment of top management. While effective programs require involvement of everyone in the hospital or other healthcare institution, they are unlikely to succeed without the total support of top management. (c) The culture of blaming individuals is inconsistent with improving patient safety (d) Efforts should be directed at eliminating patient harm. Error reporting is but one tool to utilize in improving patient safety – it is not an end in itself. (e) Patient safety has to be addressed in the context of system safety. CAC continues to strive to answer questions like: How should health care organizations and practitioners be held accountable for providing safe health care? Should regulatory agency roles and responsibilities be redefined? How? How should regulators be held responsible for setting safety standards and enforcing them? What are effective political measures for getting outmoded regulations changed? What should "public accountability" mean for hospitals? For clinicians? What does the public have a right to know? Do hospitals and clinicians have a right to confidentiality, to protection from disclosure? What are the hospital’s responsibilities to the caregivers for creating a safe environment and safe practices, policies, and procedures? What are some behaviors that would indicate than an institution was assuming accountability for safety? A caregiver? Managing patients who have been hurt – what they need and how to provide it? CAC acknowledges that Patient Safety Advocates view "the culture of blame" as the greatest inhibitor of improved safety. It is CAC's responsibility to train Board Members who know enough to address the issues of individual accountability. We insist that while we may very well need to make health care institutions much more accountable (ethically, morally, and legally), we should not ever abandon the idea that individual health care providers also need to be held accountable when they cause patient harm. How can these two opposing needs be incorporated into one quality system? It is the hope of CAC that the Practitioner Remediation and Education Partnership will begin to provide some answers. Click here to learn more about PREP and Patient Safety |