COPIC Comment: Defining patient safety and its role

Friday, May 01, 2015 12:38 PM

by Ted J. Clarke, MD, Chairman & CEO, COPIC Insurance Company

Oftentimes, conversations about improving health care highlight the significance of patient safety. It is a term we hear a lot about, but also something that can be interpreted differently. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) released a publication, titled “Advances in Patient Safety: New Directions and Alternative Approaches,” which sought to establish a clear definition for patient safety as “a discipline in the health care sector that applies safety science methods toward the goal of achieving a trustworthy system of health care delivery. Patient safety is also an attribute of health care systems; it minimizes the incidence and impact of, and maximizes recovery from, adverse events.”

This definition emphasizes that patient safety is “both a way of doing things and an emergent discipline.” Over the years, COPIC has integrated principles of patient safety into the education and resources we develop for medical professionals. In addition, we support initiatives that seek to enhance our approach to patient safety and how it is implemented and measured.

Patient safety education emphasizes non-medical aspects of care.
The AHRQ publication notes that patient safety methods “come largely from disciplines outside medicine, particularly from cognitive psychology, human factors engineering, and organizational management science.” Several of COPIC’s educational activities reinforce the value of communication. For example, our “Communication in Patient Safety” course focuses on interactions with patients, from thorough discussions on informed consent to delivering news that may trigger negative reactions. Our “Handoffs in Clinical Practice” course seeks to illustrate best practices regarding communication between providers during transfers of care.

Sharing patient safety knowledge leads to broader improvements.
Because of our role in health care, COPIC draws upon a collection of experiences that offer insight on patient safety. We believe that disseminating this knowledge is essential. We engage in forums, like the Telluride Patient Safety Conference, that allow us to connect with peers in health care to discuss current challenges and ways to address them. And our physician leaders continue to serve as contributing authors for publications, such as “Patient Safety in Surgery,” a medical reference book edited by Philip F. Stahel, MD, and Cyril Mauffrey, MD, both of Denver Health Medical Center.
 
Supporting new ideas in patient safety is core to COPIC’s mission.
Another way we promote patient safety is through grant funding by the COPIC Medical Foundation. In health care, grants are essential to connect new ways of thinking to broader audiences and assist efforts to transform ideas into tangible results. Recently, our Foundation supported the Patient Safety in Surgery journal with a grant that will allow them to develop and publish articles over the next several years. The journal is the first open‐access, peer‐reviewed, online journal in the field of surgical patient safety that provides a transparent forum for analyzing and learning from medical errors.

During the last several years, we also watched another initiative that we supported grow into a bigger idea. In 2012, emergency room physician Caleb Hernandez, MD, and a team of medical professionals received a grant from COPIC Medical Foundation to support a project that asked the question: Can the accuracy and speed of drug dosing in pediatric cardiac arrest situations be improved with a system of prefilled, color-coded syringes?

A study was conducted and the results were published in a February 2015 Annals of Emergency Medicine article. The results showed that the color-coded medication delivery system “reduced time required to prepare and administer medications, reduced overall dosing errors, and eliminated critical dosing errors during simulated pediatric resuscitations.” At this stage, Hernandez and the others involved are moving forward, knowing that their idea has a strong potential to positively impact pediatric care.

As the area of patient safety evolves, COPIC is committed to being at the forefront of this topic and contributing our ideas and resources. It is part of who we are, and will continue to define who we become.