Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Special Outpatient Surgery Edition - OR Excellence Program Preview - June 2018

Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.

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tence, says Mr. Duffy, but a much more dangerous source of errors is desensitization and inattention. Constant exposure to life-and-death situations day after day after day causes nurses to "normalize the dan- ger," he says. A combination of complacency and time pressures results in errors. To understand how it works, consider "overlearned" skills like driv- ing, says Mr. Duffy. "When my daughter was first learning how, she was extremely nervous and had the white knuckles to show for it. By the time she turned 22, she was flying down (Chicago's) Kennedy Expressway in heavy traffic, steering with her knees. She believed she had mastered driving and no longer feared this 2,000-lb. weapon." During Mr. Duffy's entertaining multimedia exploration of the role OR leaders play in ensuring a safe environment for patients and staff, you'll see memorable video clips of real and fictional disasters and near disasters that occurred not because of incompetence, but because of inattention. "I believe we remember things we see much more vividly than things we hear," he says. Mr. Duffy says he learned that he could hurt patients in his first year in practice. "A patient had been administered a medication, and it had been discontinued. However, when I visited the bedside, there was still another dose in the bin. I glanced at the record but didn't notice the discontinuation and went ahead and administered the extra dose." The patient was fine, but Mr. Duffy never forgot that the outcome could have been different. "Every day, before I entered the OR, I prayed that I wouldn't hurt a patient that day." He advises OR staff to heed the warning in the Allstate commercials: "Mayhem can happen at any time." OSM 2 6 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • J u N E 2 0 1 8 2 0 1 8 P R E V I E W

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