Shared clinical decision: Dr. Montori’s lessons

If you want to understand what the shared clinical decision is and have 16 minutes to spare, don’t hesitate and watch this interview from Dr. Selma Mohammed and Dr. Victor Montori.

Claims for adverse events: a predictive algorithm

Glòria Galvez

Strategies focused on encouraging patients' participation in the health system, and more specifically those related to quality and safety, have seen some a great deal of progress in recent years. A person-centred health system should promote active patient participation and use the complaints handled by patient care services as a specific instrument of participation. When the patient expresses the disagreement with the attention received, he or she is providing us with valuable information that is very useful in the continuous monitoring and improvement of quality. It doesn’t seem that there are many health institutions that use complaints and claims as a learning tool, but they rather use it as a mere descriptive statistic in the annual report of the organization, thus losing the opportunity for improvement that their analysis and monitoring would provide.

Dr. Gallagher, who, as someone with extensive experience in issues related to patient safety and disclosure of medical errors, has published an article in BMJ Quality & Safety: “Taking complaints seriously: using the patient safety lens” in which he proposes analysing complaints from a point of view of patient safety and treating them as if they were adverse events, in the same way as with the more traditional ones, such as those related to safe surgery or the appropriate use of medications. This is an innovative approach that will provide relevant information when proposing proactive interventions.

Survey to Advances in Clinical Management readers

The weekend effect on hospitals

A meta-analysis of 48 studies and nearly 2 million hospitalizations for acute myocardial infarction has concluded that, during the weekends, waiting time for the start of angioplasty is on average of minutes longer, while mortality at 30 days is also, on average, 6% higher, a deviation that can reach 12% if high ST segment infarctions, which are susceptible to angioplasty, are also taken into account. A North American study of nearly one million hospitalizations for acute renal failure found that patients admitted on weekends had, on average, a probability of dying 7% higher, and in another study, also with extensive databases, on scheduled surgery in English hospitals, concluded that patients operated on Friday had a 44% higher probability of dying, a figure that rose to 82% if the intervention was performed on Saturday or Sunday (see an earlier post on the subject in this same blog). The three studies cited are just a sample of the harsh reality of the phenomenon. Just perform quick search on the scientific search engines to extract, for example, three more studies that go along the same lines (Bell 2001, Freemantle 2012, Perez Concha 2014). I have even found a study that has observed a higher mortality in urgent paediatric surgery (Goldstein 2014).

Primary health care perspective of clinical management: The legacy of Barbara Starfield

Xavier Bayona

Six years ago, the magnificent Barbara Starfield left us (December 18 1932 - June 10, 2011). She was a paediatrician and a major promoter of primary health care at the international level. Virtually her entire academic and professional life was tied to Johns Hopkins University. Since 1994 she directed the Department of Health Policy and Management of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore (United States). From 1996, she was the co-director of The Johns Hopkins Primary Care Policy Centre (PCPC).

Those who had the opportunity to enjoy any of her conferences can say that she never left us feeling indifferent and she always allowed us to reflect on what we were doing and encouraged us to bring sanity to our workplaces as part of the health system. She was a great advocate for improving health systems by strengthening primary care and making sense of what is happening in the world by focusing health care on people and their needs. I still remember how in the conference room of the Catalan Oncology Institute (ICO), a few years ago, she told the audience that we were wasting time and resources with a lot of the screening we did and that we had to improve our orientation.