System Safety in Healthcare

The Challenges of Sign-offs

Authors

  • Dev Raheja

Keywords:

healthcare, sign-off, human error, computers

Abstract

With increasing demand for efficiency and productivity from a clinical team that’s often overworked and understaffed, provision of seamless patient care is challenging. Clinicians need to hand off — or sign off — essential information to the next provider to help transition care. An effective hand-off supports the transition of critical information, along with continuity of care and treatment. This article offers an overview of sign-offs, hazards and suggestions for quality improvement initiatives, as well as recommendations for potential remedies.

Author Biography

Dev Raheja

Mr. Dev Raheja has been a System Safety and System Reliability Engineering consultant for over 25 years. His range of consulting encompasses transportation systems, electric power systems, high tech industry, aerospace, defense systems, medical systems, and consumer products. He has conducted training in several countries including Sweden, Australia, Japan, UK, Turkey, Germany, Poland, Singapore, Brazil, South Africa, and Canada. He has done training and consulting work with NASA, U.S. Army, GM, Boeing, Eaton, Nissan Aerospace, Litton, General Dynamics, ITT, BAE Systems, Lockheed-Martin, Harley-Davidson, and United Technologies.

Prior to consulting, Mr. Raheja worked at General Electric, Cooper Industries, and at Booz-Allen & Hamilton. He is the author of several books including Assurance Technologies Principles and Practices (Second Edition, Wiley 2006), and Design for Reliability (Wiley, 2012). A Fellow of the System Safety Society, he has a received Scientific Achievement Award and the Educator-of the-Year Award from the society.

Mr. Raheja serves on the Patient and Families Advisory Council at Johns Hopkins Hospital as a patient safety advocate. He is Associate Editor for Healthcare Safety for The Journal of System Safety and an Associate Professor at University of Maryland where he teaches the “Design For Reliability” course which includes design for safety and trustworthiness.

References

Makary, Martin, M.D. “What Hospitals Won’t Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Healthcare,” March 24, 2013, http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/03/24/modern-medical-errors.aspx

Buppert, Carolyn. “Electronic Medical Records: 18 Ways to Reduce Legal Risks,” Topics in Advanced Practice Nursing eJournal, January 13, 2010, http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/714812_1

Roberts, Laura and Amy Bailie Muckler. “Electronic Health Records – Auditing Quality and Compliance,” American Health Lawyers Association, http://www.healthlawyers.org/Events/Programs/Materials/Documents/FC12/205_muckler_roberts_slides.pdf, accessed on October 10, 2014.

Raheja, Dev. “System Safety in Healthcare: Preliminary Hazard Analysis for Minimizing Sentinel, Adverse and Never Event,” Journal of System Safety, July-August 2009.

Raheja, Dev, and Maria C. Escano, M.D. “Reducing Patient Healthcare Safety Risks Through Fault Tree Analysis,” Journal of System Safety, September-October 2009.

Zhani, Elizabeth Eaken. “Hospitals Still Far from Being Highly Reliable,” The Milbank Quarterly, September 17, 2013.

Healthcare

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Published

2014-06-01

How to Cite

Raheja, D. (2014). System Safety in Healthcare: The Challenges of Sign-offs. Journal of System Safety, 50(2), 10–11. Retrieved from https://jsystemsafety.com/index.php/jss/article/view/221

Issue

Vol. 50 No. 2 (2014): Selling the Need for Safety

Section

Columns and Perspectives

Categories

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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