Insights from the Armstrong Institute
How many of our conflicts could be handled better or averted if we had the opportunity to spend some time in the shoes of the person on "the other side"? When we experience a situation through another's eyes, and when we understand their work and world, true empathy, understanding and trust can emerge. This is(...)
Hospitals across the country are searching for ways to create the "always positive" patient experience. For example, we want our patients to tell us that their pain was always addressed, that clinicians were always responsive to their needs and that our communications at discharge time always helped prepare them to take care of themselves once(...)
Let's say that you're a nurse on a hospital unit, and a colleague has recently been involved in a medication error. It was a mistake that anyone might make — a tenfold overdose that occurred when she wrote down an order and accidentally moved a decimal point one space to the right. Luckily, it didn't lead(...)
She was a newly minted Johns Hopkins Hospital pediatric nurse — let's call her Mary — but she was already unsure if she had chosen the right career path. She had inserted an intravenous line into a young patient's arm, and there had been an infiltrate, a pooling of IV fluid under the child's skin that indicated(...)
For years, physician assistant Stephanie Figueroa has worked with our Emergency Department and the sickle cell care team to improve the treatment of patients with this disease who arrive with acute pain crisis. When beds were unavailable in the busy adult ED, these patients might spend hours in excruciating pain before our staff were able(...)
For a moment, consider that you work at a primary care clinic, and your team needs to improve performance on annual foot exams on patients with diabetes — a critical step to prevent foot ulcers and amputations. At your monthly meeting, staff members enthusiastically suggest solutions, such as using robocalls to urge patients to schedule appointments(...)
When you are a patient at a hospital, you want to know that the executives who run that facility put the safety and quality of care above all other concerns. Encouragingly, more of them are saying that safety is indeed their number-one priority—a fitting answer given that preventable patient harm may claim more than 400,000(...)
Often, when giving talks to health care professionals about the urgent need to improve patient safety and quality, I ask them to do an exercise. At the beginning of the talk, they write down “I will…” on a piece of paper. As the talk comes to a close, the audience is urged to complete that(...)
The safety concerns that keep clinicians awake at night often aren't issues that you could fit onto a safety and quality dashboard. They aren't the kinds of things that feed metrics on the CMS Hospital Compare website or any of the other sources of publicly reported quality measures. They are intensely local, and no less(...)
Last Thursday, I made a presentation about patient safety to about 200 senior citizens at The Women’s Club of Chatham. My mother lives there, a picture-perfect town at the elbow of Cape Cod, with an old-fashioned main street that hosts a Fourth of July parade. For a while she had been asking me to give(...)