Your Patient Safety Survival Guide

by Gretchen Lefever Watson

Each year, one out of every four hospital patients in the United States will be harmed by the care they receive. Over 400,000 will die as a result. Dr. Gretchen LeFever Watson's definitive guide empowers patients to be patient safety advocates.

It takes a village to combat preventable errors and omissions that cause millions of deaths and sickness in our nation’s hospitals and care facilities. Although most of these deaths are due to human and system errors—not faulty medical decisions or diagnoses—this annual death toll—as well as the millions of additional incidents of survivable patient harm—could be cut in half through consistent use of simple and nearly cost-free safety behaviors.

In Your Patient Safety Survival Guide, Gretchen LeFever Watson delivers a patient-centered blueprint on how to transform the patient-safety movement so that millions of unnecessary illnesses and deaths in hospitals, outpatient facilities, and nursing homes can be avoided. She provides key safety habits that people must learn to recognize so they can be sure hospital personnel use them during every patient encounter. She also explains how addressing the most common safety problems will set the stage for tackling a wide range of issues, including healthcare’s role in the overuse of opiate painkillers and its related heroin epidemic.

Watson’s call for a more sensible societal response to medical and human error in hospitals promotes a timely and full disclosure of all mistakes—an approach that has been proven to accelerate the emotional recovery of everyone affected by patient safety events while also reducing the financial burden on hospitals, providers, and patients.

Readers will learn how
• Change behavior to catch medical errors before they result in illness or death.
• Prevent the spread of dangerous infections in hospitals and other care facilities.
• Leverage the power of basic safety/hygiene habits.
• Eliminate mistakes during surgery and other invasive procedures.
• Avoid medication errors and the overuse of opiates
• Raise awareness and inspire civic action in their communities.

Genres: Medicine, Health

222 pages, Paperback

First published August 3, 2017

About the author

Dr. Watson is an award-winning clinical psychologist whose research and intervention projects have received international scholarly and media attention, including appearances on TV and radio programs such as CNN, the PBS News Hour, and The Diane Rehm Show. Dr. Watson was among the first to document drug overtreatment for ADHD in the U.S. and to demonstrate that disruptive conduct can be successfully reduced through schoolwide behavioral interventions. In addition to academic, corporate, and civic leadership positions, Dr. Watson served as a patient safety director for a large healthcare system. Currently, she is President of SLS (www.yoursls.com), a consulting firm for organizational safety and change management. She enjoys spending time with her daughter and windsurfing with her husband in Virginia and around the world. Her first book, Your Patient Safety Survival Guide (http://bit.ly/AmazonPatientSafety) made an Amazon #1 Best Sellers List in August 2017.

Reviews

[Elizabeth F Mathewson · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent reference written by a knowledgeable woman.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good info! Read before your next involvement w/ any sort of surgery!

[Caroline Carlisle · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a series of book reports and summarized articles that the author looked at with a a large pair of binoculars before taking a shallow dive and discovering that the big takeaway is that we need a “bottom-up” insider approach to tackling patient safety. Without apparently doing any work to interview or speak to anyone working on the front line, she actually contradicts herself often throughout the book. Referring to a failure to wash hands as both a harmless mistake and a potentially fatal one. As a nurse myself I can say the only takeaways from this book are wash your hands, be sure to patient verify when giving medications, and listen to patients concerns. Is there more to it? Certainly, but you won’t find it in this book. Take my word for it, if you have a low tolerance for the phrase “mission statement” and “community-based coalition” and whatever other terms hospital ceos have come up with the occupy their time, don’t bother.

[Eden Deez · Rating 1 out of 5]

copy i had wasstinky

[Rae Simpson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Minuteman. Buy?