Simulation Training Is Key to Patient Safety
This means that individuals should not be humiliated, mocked, demeaned, or chastised for things they did or failed to do during a simulated scenario.
The whole point of simulation training is that we are all prone to errors, and that simulation is a way to help train providers and teams of providers to avoid these errors through increased technical skill, communication, and team support.
The incorporation of simulation into training in obstetrics and gynecology in the United States is relatively new, but shows great promise as a tool to improve providers' technical skills, teamwork and communication, and, most importantly, patient safety.
Source Graphics courtesy Dr. Hugh Mighty
Improving Our Safety Profile
Quality is a buzzword in industry, and safety has become one in medicine in recent years.
Safety is not an issue that is new to medicine. Health care professionals have always embraced the idea of safety as a fundamental part of the practice of good medicine, and everyone would agree that their practice is safe, and they've made every effort to execute safe and effective principles as they care for patients. Safety has, however, taken on added urgency since 1999, when the Institute of Medicine released shocking statistics, estimating that as many as 98,000 people die in any given year as a result of medical errors that occur in hospitals.
The findings were an eye-opener for the nation as a whole and for us as physicians. Despite our having embraced a safety mantra, the numbers of deaths due to medical errors were unexpectedly high.
This led to a wave of purposeful efforts to ensure the highest level of effectiveness and the lowest level of adverse consequences. In obstetrics, patient safety takes on added significance because of the potential long-term consequences of adverse outcomes and the associated litigious environment. Initiatives are especially important for the prevention and reduction of adverse events, thus increasing the safety profile to the highest possible level.
Several initiatives have been introduced in recent years to improve our safety profile. We're in an early phase of a significant evolution toward “systemwide” changes in obstetrics safety programs. There are a large number of safety initiatives being tested, but thus far the outcomes and effectiveness of various approaches are unclear. Inherently, we may always have fewer absolute results than we do in other fields.
Despite the limitations of a large body of data, it is worthwhile to review and share various approaches in labor and delivery safety programs, to monitor success as best as we can, and to see if we can identify some evolving best practices.
In this light, we have invited Dr. Hugh Mighty, associate professor and chair, department of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, to be our guest professor.
Dr. Mighty has played a key role in establishing patient safety initiatives in labor and delivery at the University of Maryland Medical Center. He is a proponent of the use of simulation as a key safety program initiative and will describe its importance and detail what his experience and the experience of others have shown about how simulation can be meaningfully and successfully integrated into the practice of obstetrics.
