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Telling a tale: Sharing stories helps hospital with National Patient Safety Goals

Staff Development Weekly: Insight on Evidence-Based Practice in Education, October 6, 2006

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Storytelling can help to convince skeptical staff about the usefulness of many patient safety initiatives. At Wiley Medical Center in Casper, WY, staff share their experiences regarding medical errors and near misses to emphasize the importance of following the National Patient Safety Goals (NPSG).

The hospital started by telling four stories during unit nursing meetings. Each one touched upon several patient safety goals and how doing things a little differently could have helped to avoid an error. Hospital staff talked about their experiences, including the following:

• Wrong site invasive procedure. This highlighted the need for a final surgical time out, physician handwriting legibility, and physician-to-nurse communication.
• Patient specimen mislabeling. This lesson taught others to follow the JCAHO's patient identification goal and the use of a time out to verify the patient's identity.
• Failure to rescue. This experience displayed the need for a proper handoff of patient care and physician-to-nurse communication.
• Second failure to rescue. This lesson explained the difficulties that exist in handing off a patient from one unit to another, and several layers of communications (e.g., physician-to-nurse, physician-to-physician, and chief nursing officer-to-nurse).

To learn more, go to Briefings on Patient Safety (BOPS). For the cost of just three stories, you can get the entire October issue of BOPS. Click here to choose between the PDF and HTML versions for just $30. Subscribers to the online version of BOPS have free access to this article. Subscribers to the print newsletter can find this article in their October issue.

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