Spam
Due to lots of pointless spam registration, I’ve closed new membership on this site for now. I’ll sort out something better in the near future.
Posts by » gav :
NHS patient safety concerns gather momentum.
Just last month, the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) published 6 monthly safety incident reporting figures for NHS Trusts for April to September 2008. You can find the report for your trust here.
In these reports, the ‘flagship’ Mid Staffordshire Foundation Trust, which everybody in the NHS clinical governance system has been trying so hard [...]
Incident-triggered random clinical audits.
A very interesting paper by Lee et al regarding the trial of a simple risk management process in Bristol’s Southmead NICU was published in August 2008 (Archives of Disease in Childhood - Fetal and Neonatal Edition 2009;94:F116-F119).
To quote the deputy editor’s comments;
“Over recent years, we have carried a number of papers examining rates of adverse [...]
The Scale of the Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Problem in the UK.
The number of stillbirths and neonatal deaths every year in the UK is more than twice the number of deaths on UK roads. While road safety attracts a huge amount of attention, resources and legislation, perinatal mortality still tends to be regarded as an unhappy fact of life about which little can be done.
But [...]
Human Rights Article 2 and Medical Negligence Investigation.
This extended quotation is from a discussion about patient safety by Dr Michael J Powers QC. It explains some of the legal background to the right to a thorough investigation into the circumstances surrounding a negligent death.
“When a death suspected to have resulted from poor medical practice/care occurs, the coroner’s inquest is very often [...]
About Talking to People.
After the death of our baby, we spent the next two weeks up at the hospital while his mother began recovering from the difficult birth, and then fighting off an unidentified infection acquired during the caesarean (probably group b strep, as it turns out). As if things could possibly be worse than loosing a baby, she [...]
How more might be learned about Stillbirth and Neonatal Death.
In the guidance for Serious Untoward Incidents (SUI) from different hospital trusts that I’ve seen published on the web, a common example of the kind of adverse event that might start the process off is the death of a baby. Some trusts go as far as suggesting stillbirth - even as far back as [...]
Interesting Survey as Part of Why 17?
UK Sands (the Stillbirth and Neonatal Death charity) is currently running a campaign called “Why 17?”. The idea is to raise awareness of the average 17 stillbirths and neonatal deaths that occur every day in the UK. They are calling for
recognition that stillbirth and neonatal death is a national problem and not [...]
Families Of Critically Ill Patients Want To Discuss Uncertain Prognoses.
Critically ill patients frequently have uncertain prognoses, but their families overwhelmingly wish that physicians would address prognostic uncertainty candidly, according to a new study out of the University of San Francisco Medical Center.
In face-to-face interviews with 179 surrogate decision-makers for patients in four separate intensive care units (ICUs), 87 % of caregivers indicated that they [...]
Make timelines that illustrate the whole story.
People understand something by understanding its context, not by cramming the details of that thing into their brain. That is why making diagrams is such a useful technique for understanding complicated things; it puts all the details into some kind of context and helps you make sense of things.
Here is a timeline I built [...]