{"id":46485,"date":"2018-05-08T13:29:08","date_gmt":"2018-05-08T17:29:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/newsroom.carleton.ca\/?p=46485"},"modified":"2025-08-19T09:36:44","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T13:36:44","slug":"carleton-conference-examines-how-to-reduce-medical-errors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/2018\/carleton-conference-examines-how-to-reduce-medical-errors\/","title":{"rendered":"杏吧原创 Conference Examines How to Reduce Medical Errors"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n 杏吧原创 Conference Examines How to Reduce Medical Errors\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

By Tyrone Burke<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Health care is the most human of endeavours, but \u2013 like just about everything else \u2013it\u2019s become increasingly driven by technological innovation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Health care technologies hold great promise in improving patient care, but high-tech gadgets don\u2019t always make care better. Medical errors are a leading cause of death in hospitals, and new software and hardware introduces more scope for operator errors with life or death consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To ensure Canadian hospitals optimize their use of innovative technologies, Distinguished Research Prof. Monique Frize brought together clinical engineers, information technology specialists, physicians and nurses from across Canada and Italy for a patient safety workshop at 杏吧原创\u2019s Faculty of Engineering and Design<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Participants at the May 3 to 4 event gave research presentations and shared expertise with in networking sessions. Together, they\u2019ll author a report on patient safety to present to several organizations in Canada, Italy and around the world as a best practice guideline on developing and managing health-care technology systems and optimizing patient safety.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe often introduce new innovations,\u201d said Patricia Trbovich of the University of Toronto\u2019s Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation<\/a>, \u201cwhether it\u2019s tool, a technology, a process, a checklist, a new training but we don\u2019t always do so in a way that positions our clinicians for success \u2013 or our patients for that matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBack in the day, the focus was really on the people, but contrast that with today\u2019s environment and we focus on innovations. We still have great clinicians, but we\u2019ve seen that switch. Improvements are required to reap the full benefits of health-care technologies,\u201d said Trbovich, who co-organized the event with Frize and Tony Easty, adjunct professor at the University of Toronto.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are many ways health care technology can be improved. Scott Olsen of Alberta Health Services<\/a> shared his organization\u2019s approach to ensuring consistency of the equipment it uses, and Andrew Ibey of the Children\u2019s Hospital of Eastern Ontario<\/a> (CHEO) presented a case study of how different software updates on a pump at a Vancouver hospital led to a drug dosage error that could have killed a patient, highlighting the importance of a comprehensive approach to managing equipment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Distinguishing between human error and system failure is a challenging but critical task. A culture of perfectionism in medicine can lead to blame shifting or avoidance, but real system failures can lead to multiple incidents if left unaddressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMany systems are not designed with patient safety in mind,\u201d Easty says. \u201cThey\u2019re overly complex, they\u2019re not intuitive. We need to design technology that\u2019s simpler. There\u2019s no value to technology that makes things more difficult. If it takes someone half a day to learn to use an infusion pump, they\u2019ll never find the time to do it. Or they may get it right once, but they\u2019ll never remember it because it\u2019s way too complex. We need to design systems that don\u2019t take hours and hours to learn how to use. I\u2019ve seen physicians push technology across a room, and I get that. I get frustrated by technology too. It shouldn\u2019t drive you nuts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be effective, systems need to be designed for clinical environments, but there\u2019s a disconnect. The engineers who design health-care technologies aren\u2019t clinicians, and don\u2019t always intuitively understand how nurses and physicians will interact with technologies in a busy clinical setting with competing priorities and limited time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So how can this multilayered interface between humans and technology be improved?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By teamwork and communication, according to Frize, who draws from more than four decades of experience as a clinical and biomedical engineer, including 18 years in hospitals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen I was a clinical engineer, we were completely separate from the IT people,\u201d Frize said. \u201cThey bought the computers and wired them, and did the software installations and bought software. Now there\u2019s more integration. In many places, they\u2019ve integrated the two departments. In others, they\u2019re still fighting. I think the ideal is to work together.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a model to emulate, Frize points to her ongoing research into decision support tools in the neonatal care environment with Erika Bariciak at CHEO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOur team is working with the IT people, clinical engineers and physicians,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf people just have their own little territories and they fight for that . . . well, I think it\u2019s a disaster and there will be many accidents.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Tyrone Burke Health care is the most human of endeavours, but \u2013 like just about everything else \u2013it\u2019s become increasingly driven by technological innovation. Health care technologies hold great promise in improving patient care, but high-tech gadgets don\u2019t always make care better. Medical errors are a leading cause of death in hospitals, and new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":410,"featured_media":47276,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[114],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-46485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus-news","tag-faculty-of-engineering-and-design"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/410"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46485"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47277,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46485\/revisions\/47277"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}