Patient Safety Discussion Forum

For brevity s sake we sometimes use "systems" to refer both to safety-enabling elements and to organizational sustaining systems. Much current patient safety activity is focused at the level of these systems. Our (unpublished) survey of the May 2006 activity in the Patient Safety Discussion Forum, an Internet newsgroup sponsored by the National Patient Safety Foundation, revealed that almost 90% of the forum s discussion threads dealt with systems issues. The task of addressing systems issues can be safely delegated provided the... 

Process improvements may be conducted by the completion of a task or a project. A task is an activity that can be completed by the process owner with minimal cost and/or resources over a short period of time. A project is defined as temporary work to provide a product or service that is beyond the process owner s support. In general, a project requires more than one full-time equivalent (FTE), crosses over multiple functional organizations, and the duration of the effort spans over a longer period of time. Improvement status, updates, and issues should be discussed on a regular basis by a management forum or steering committee. Tasks and projects should be prioritized based on the risk against patient safety and efficacy and compliance. 

How many patient safety-related safer practices were endorsed by the National Quality Forum in the United States in 2003 Discuss one of these practices. 

Source Adapted from Roundtable Discussion on Design Considerations for a Patient Safety Improvement Reporting System, sponsored by Kaiser Permanente Institute for Health Policy, NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System, and the National Quality Forum, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffitt Field, Calif., Aug. 28-29,2000. 

The subjects of data security and privacy are not considered by this paper, although they are cormnonly used as part of the patient safety definition when discussing regulation in an international or European forum. In the UK our view of patient safety does not include these facets. This exclusion is justified in Sec-... 

The National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) began working to improve the safety of patients even earlier than the lOM s 1999 report on patient safety. Among its many contributions, the foundation sponsors research in patient safety, a patient safety e-mail discussion forum, and the NPSF Annual Patient Safety Congress. 

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