Finding patient safety Internet resources - Research Corner

AORN Journal,  June, 2002  by Suzanne C. Beyea

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

One approach to learning more about patient safety issues and strategies to prevent medical errors and adverse events is searching the Internet. Many organizations and groups have developed web sites that can assist both clinicians and patients. Many of these web sites provide up-to-date, helpful information and clinical alerts.

Exploring web sites such as these can help nurses learn about the problem of medical errors and prepare to address issues in their facilities. Many web sites provide information that clinicians can use to support their efforts to improve clinical processes and, thus, ensure high quality, cost-effective patient outcomes. Many of these web sites also provide access to discussion groups or links to additional resources.

This column provides an overview of many safety-related web sites (Table 1). This listing and description is not intended to be inclusive. It simply is meant to highlight some frequently mentioned web sites. Readers are encouraged to explore a variety of web sites and identify those that will be most helpful to their specific specialty and clinical issues.

GOVERNMENT RESOURCES

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality site is a helpful web resource that provides a collection of documents, press releases, workshops, speeches, congressional hearings, and information related to the Quality Interagency Coordination Task Force. Both consumer and professional information is provided, including "Twenty tips to help prevent medical errors: Patient fact sheet" and "Reducing medical errors in healthcare: Fact sheet." The Institute of Medicine's report on medical errors also may be found on this site.

Another helpful government web resource is the Veterans Health Administration's Virtual Learning Center. This web page lists frequently asked questions along with answers and provides brief lessons on patient safety that users can search or browse. Each lesson discusses a specific clinical alert, recommended interventions, and reference materials.

The National Center for Patient Safety embodies the Department of Veterans Affairs' (VA) commitment to reducing and preventing adverse medical events. This web site includes information about the VA's patient safety program and provides information about the culture of safety to which the VA system ascribes. This culture includes a focus on prevention and not punishment, applying human factor analysis, and the safety research of reliable organizations targeted at identifying and eliminating system problems.

Another government resource is the Quality Interagency Coordination Task Force web site. The purpose of the task force is to ensure that all federal agencies involved in purchasing, providing, studying, or regulating health care services work in a coordinated fashion to improve health care quality. Typical resources on this site include "Five steps to safer health care: Patient fact sheet" and "Report to the president on medical errors."

ORGANIZATIONS AND GROUPS

One organization at the fore-front of gathering and providing information on patient safety is the Leapfrog Group for Patient Safety. The Leapfrog Group is a coalition of more than 90 public and private organizations that provide health care benefits. The coalition was formed to address patient safety and quality issues in the US health care system. The group, founded by the Business Roundtable, focuses on basic patient safety and encourages employers to follow purchasing principles designed to improve patient safety and quality.

The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations' web site includes a web page titled "Facts about patient safety." This resource focuses on standards that help facilities develop processes to identify, report, analyze, and prevent sentinel events. Visitors to the page can access Sentinel Event Alert, a monthly newsletter, and obtain information related to sentinel events, such as fatal falls, postoperative complications, wrong site surgery, and blood transfusion errors. Users also can sign up to receive an e-mail version of the newsletter. A listing of sentinel events and related frequency reports of these events is located on the page as well.

The Institute for Safe Medication Practices site provides an independent review of medication errors submitted to the Medical Errors Reporting Program developed by United States Pharmacopoeia. It focuses on improving medication distribution, naming, packaging, labeling, and delivery system design. Visitors to this site can review medication safety alerts, patient alerts, a message board, and a conceptual framework for a national medical error reporting system.

The Institute of Medicine web site provides objective information and advice about health to government officials, businesses, and the public. The Institute's Special Initiative on Health Care Quality aims to improve the quality of health care in the United States. The goals of this initiative are to evaluate quality assessment and improvement tools and their use and to inform consumers, policy makers, providers, and others of key opportunities and obstacles to achieving better health outcomes for individuals and populations. This web site also provides access to recent Institute of Medicine reports and publications.