Book: Safer Hospital Care: Strategies for Continuous Innovation

(CRC Press: Boca Raton, FL) -- From newborns switched in the nursery to medication mix-ups and hospital-acquired infections, we are all familiar with the horror stories about hospital safety. The safety issue in U.S. hospitals has become so profound and embedded, that we cannot hope to fix it without a radical shift in our approach. After defining and demonstrating the true depth of this dangerous concern, Safer Hospital Care: Strategies for Continuous Innovation (CRC Press, 2010) elaborates on the steps required to make that shift a reality.

A respected and sought-out expert on hospital safety, author Dev Raheja draws on his 25 years of experience as a risk management and quality assurance consultant to provide hospital stakeholders with a systematic way to learn the science of safe care. Supported by case studies as well as input from such paradigm pioneers as Johns Hopkins and Seattle Children’s Hospital, he explains how to:

• Adapt evidence-based safety theories and tools taken from the aerospace, nuclear, and chemical industries
• Identify the combination of root causes that result in an adverse event
• Apply analytical tools that can effectively measure hospital efficiency
• Establish evidence between lean strategies and patient satisfaction
• Make use of various types of innovation, including accidental, incremental, strategic, and radical, and establish a culture conducive to innovation

This practical guide shows how to find solutions that are simple and comprehensive, and can produce a high return on investment. To reform hospitals, we must recognize that they are highly dynamic systems that must be fixed systemically. Instead of thinking in terms of continuous improvement, we need to think in terms of continuous innovation. Safe hospital care is not just about doing things right; it is also about breaking old habits, finding new tools, and doing the right things.

Each chapter has an introduction, summary, and references:

1. The Etiologies of Unsafe Healthcare
2. Sufficient Understanding Is a Prerequisite to Safe Care
3. Preventing "Indifferencity" to Enhance Patient Safety
4. Continuous Innovation Is Better Than Continuous Improvement
5. Innovations Should Start with Incidence Reports
6. Doing More with Less Is Innovation
7. Reinvent Quality Management
8. Reinvent Risk Management
9. Human Errors May Be Unpreventable; Preventing Harm Is an Innovation
10. Managing Safety: Lessons from Aerospace
11. The Paradigm Pioneers
12. Protect Patients from Dangers in Medical Devices
13. Heuristics for Continuous Innovation
14. Aequanimitas—The Best-Known Strategy for Safe Care
Appendix A: Swiss Cheese Model for Error-Trapping

Dev Raheja is a patient-safety and quality assurance consultant with more than 25 years experience in aviation, medical device, and health care safety. He worked for GE Health Care as quality assurance manager and at Booz-Allen & Hamilton as risk manager. Raheja has served as adjunct professor at University of Maryland for its Ph.D. program in reliability engineering. He has also taught system safety courses at UCLA, University of Alabama, George Washington University, and University of Wisconsin. Raheja is the author of Assurance Technologies Principles and Practices (Wiley, Second Edition, 2006) and Zen and the Art of Breakthrough Quality Management (Design for Competitiveness, 2001).

About The Author