Health Journalism and the Patient Safety Movement

UCSF's own Robert Wachter has published another well-written, thought-provoking commentary, this time on the contribution that the media makes in the patient safety effort. Titled "The media: an essential, if sometimes artibrary, promoter of patient safety", it appears in AHRQ's Morbidity & Mortality Rounds on the Web and includes an interview with Charles Ornstein, Pulitzer prize-winning health care journalist.

Especially interesting to me was Ornstein's explanation of how health care reporters get their leads and how good journalists provide balance and perspective (how bad is this compared to other hospitals?) as well as just getting the facts straight on what are often very complex topics.

Front Lines

I visited one of our primary care clinics today with the goal of showing the physicians and nurse practitioners how to register for our Loansome Doc service, a full text document delivery service that's built into PubMed. As long as I don't get too long-winded (a temptation) I'm well received during these visits because what is being offered is a quick, easy-to-use service at no charge to the individuals or their clinics. Gotta like it.

Here's a secret: although I make clinic visits under the guise of registering clinicians for Loansome Doc, I always manage to propagandize a bit for some of our other library services, including my absolute all-time favorite resource: Da-da...DynaMed. Click the DynaMed link on our home page to take a look.

DynaMed is a point-of-care tool that is in a good position, I think, to knock off the current king of the hill, UpToDate. Unlike UTD, DynaMed has clearly explained graded levels of evidence, great navigation, clickable reference links to full text articles AND a very usable version for PDAs, including smart phones. Not to mention the fact that it costs approximately 1/10th of what an UTD site license costs. If you are a SFGH clinician and would like to get access to DynaMed, please contact me, jgraham@sfghdean.ucsf.edu. I'll send you the information you need to get started.

Oh yes, this post was supposed to be about Loansome Doc. You can contact me at that same email address if you want to register for Loansome Doc.

Blame vs. Accountability

This week's New England Journal of Medicine contains an article by UCSF's Robert Wachter about the delicate balance between the "no blame" approach and the sometimes overlooked need for physician accountability in regards to patient safety issues. The authors suggest that because physicians are not hospital employees they are subject to only weak enforcement of safety standards. Not wanting to alienate physicians and lose the business they bring in, hospitals have been reluctant to play the enforcer.



Citing the "no-blame" approach as the wrong tool for mature patient-safety practices, Wachter and co-author J. Pronovost (Johns Hopkins) get down to brass tacks by suggesting the circumstances under which physicians should be chastised for lack of adherence to patient safety practices and giving specific punishments such as loss of privileges and education for specific transgressions.



I imagine this article will generate a few letters to the editor, but because it bridges the gap between theory and practice, it's a valuable contribution to patient safety literature and a good starting point for further discussion.