Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals: How One Doctor's Checklist Can Help Us Change Health Care from the Inside Out [Bargain Price] [Paperback]

Peter Pronovost (Author), Eric Vohr (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 25, 2011

"The tough-minded and revealing story of a leading doctor's crusade against medical harm...Fascinating reading." -Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto.

First, do no harm. Doctors, nurses, and clinicians swear by this code of conduct. Yet, medical errors are made every single day-avoidable mistakes that often cost lives. Inspired by two such mistakes, Dr. Peter Pronovost made it his personal mission to improve patient safety and make preventable deaths a thing of the past, one hospital at a time.

Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals shows how Dr. Pronovost started a revolution by creating a simple checklist that standardized a common ICU procedure. His reforms are being implemented in all fifty states and have saved hundreds of lives by cutting hospital-acquired infection rates by 70%. Atul Gawande profiled Dr. Pronovost's reforms in a New Yorker article and his bestselling book The Checklist Manifesto is based upon Dr. Pronovost's success in patient safety. But Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals is the real story: an inspiring, thought-provoking, accessible insider's narrative about how doctors and nurses are improving patient care for all Americans, today.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals is the tough-minded and revealing story of a leading doctor's crusade against medical harm. The tale of Peter Pronovost's journey in patient safety is fascinating reading."
-Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto, Better, and Complications

"No one in America has thought more -- and done more -- about patient safety than Dr. Pronovost. Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals is the right prescription for American health care."
-Sherrod Brown, United States Senator (Ohio)

"Dr. Pronovost and Mr. Vohr offer a constructive and compelling case for patient safety and improving health care quality in the United States. Health providers and policy makers would benefit greatly from reading this book."
-Tom Daschle, former Senator and author of Critical: What We Can Do about the Health-Care Crisis

"Both riveting and important.... Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals gives an excellent overview of changes in hospital practice which, when instituted, profoundly affect rates of serious medical complications and death. A pioneer in the field of patient safety, [Peter Pronovost] has radically altered how modern medicine is practiced."
-Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph. D., author of An Unquiet Mind and Nothing Was the Same

"A must read for doctors, nurses, administrators and especially the public. Patient safety can only be achieved by everyone being informed and asking questions when...the train is [headed] off the track."
-Edward D. Miller, M.D., Chief Executive Officer of Johns Hopkins Medicine, Dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and and vice president for medicine of The Johns Hopkins University

"A wonderful, beautifully written book-if every hospital in the country read it and followed Peter's advice, I believe there would be fewer deaths from medical efforts and we would all benefit. Dr. Pronovost is a true hero, both to many in the healthcare industry and patients as well. Because of his hard work, passion, and brilliance, Peter has made hospitals around the world safer for us all. Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals is a true testament that one person can make a difference."
-Sorrel King, patient safety advocate and author of Josie's Story

"Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals reminds us how great change can be wrought by one person with the courage to do the right thing. Dr. Pronovost's account tells the thrilling story about how--not so long ago--sloppiness and medical arrogance made even the best American hospitals perilous places to spend the night. His remedy: something simple, elegant, convincing."
-Jean McGarry, professor at The Writing Seminars, Johns Hopkins University and author of seven books of fiction

"Peter Pronovost is a true visionary, whose simple checklist will save many lives and highlight the fact that the simplest answer is often the best, a must- read for all healthcare workers."
-Patrick Perry, M.P.H, Executive Editor, The Saturday Evening Post

"Captivating and readable, this book takes a hard, honest look at the truth about toxic hospital cultures and the need for addressing culture, teamwork and cooperation. The compelling stories Peter shares illustrate the transformation that occurs when institutions address these issues. I also think the emphasis on improving work environments and respect among all professions involved in patient care clearly impacts nurses' satisfaction, retention, and the nursing shortage in hospitals."
-Martha N. Hill, PhD, RN, Dean and Professor of Nursing, Medicine and Public Health at Johns Hopkins University

"A riveting account right from the first page... Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals is a must read for everyone in healthcare including consumers. The authors have covered particularly well the perspectives and challenges of nurses in keeping patients safe. The book is a "good read" for us all."
-Linda H. Aiken, Ph.D., The Claire M. Fagin Leadership Professor of Nursing and Professor of Sociology, Director, Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research; University of Pennsylvania

"Dr. Peter Pronovost was first to recognize checklists have power to save lives and save money. We've heard about Dr. Pronovost's checklists from learned journals and from the TV show 'ER. His innovative ideas promote low cost, low tech solutions that have a high impact."
-Barbara Mikulski, US Senator (Maryland)

"Having been at Hopkins for over three decades, I have been privileged to witness first- hand enormous advances in patient safety, largely through the efforts of Dr. Peter Pronovost. Through this book, the authors are making life- saving knowledge widely available not only to healthcare providers, but to patients and their loved ones. This book is a long overdue and welcome addition to the body of critically important medical information and it will save lives."
-Benjamin S. Carson, Sr., M.D., Professor of Neurological Surgery, Oncology, Plastic Surgery, and Pediatrics

"Dr. Pronovost's engaging book describes his journey to galvanize the healthcare community to eliminate bloodstream infections. It is an excellent case study in leadership, and should be read by anyone trying to lead a change effort."
-Nolan D. Archibald, Chairman of the Board, President & Chief Executive Officer, The Black & Decker Corporation --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Dr. Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD, is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and the medical director of the Center for Innovation in Quality patient Care and the Quality and Safety Research Group at Johns Hopkins University.
Eric Vohr teaches vocational writing.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Plume; 1 edition (January 25, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452296862
• ASIN: B0057D9R2M
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #679,250 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 46 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars How to Save Many Lives February 18, 2010

By AdamSmythe

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Having already read Dr. Atul Gawande's popular book, The Checklist Manifesto, I wondered whether or not Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals, by Peter Pronovost, M.D., Ph.D., would capture and hold my attention. After one chapter, I had no doubts.

As hard as it may be to believe in a country as advanced as the United States, thousands of people die each year from preventable medical mistakes. This book addresses why this happens and what can be done to save many of these people. Dr. Pronovost begins with the tragic story of 18-month-old Josie King, who was accidentally scalded at home and developed second degree burns. She acquired an all-too-common bacterial infection from a central line catheter while in the hospital, and then she got a secondary infection when the antibiotics administered to control the original infection killed helpful bacteria in her digestive system. Then there was sepsis and dehydration, but even all of this would not have killed the young girl were it not for lack of sufficient coordination and cooperation among the medical staff treating her. Just one chapter into this book you are already grieving, and you want to know more. By the way, if the term "central line catheter infection" sounds familiar, Dr. Gawande writes extensively about this problem in his book (and he characterizes Dr. Pronovost's book as a "tough-minded and revealing story of a leading doctor's crusade against medical harm").

It turns out that Dr. Pronovost's own father died in part because his cancer was not correctly characterized early enough--so Dr. P. finally enlists in the army of reformers. Along the way, he distills an unwieldy 120-page set of guidelines to reduce central line infections from the Center for Disease Control down to five key steps: (1) Wash your hands using soap or alcohol prior to placing the catheter, (2) wear sterile gloves, hat, mask and gown and completely cover the patient with sterile drapes, (3) avoid placing the catheter in the groin in possible, (4) clean the insertion site on the patient's skin with chlorhexidine antiseptic solution, and (5) remove catheters when they are no longer needed. Believe it or not, straightforward procedures like this ultimately reduce infections by over 50% in many cases.

Dr. Pronovost tells of an encounter (argument, really) with a surgeon who refused Dr. P's urgent request to perform additional surgery on a recent surgery patient. Fortunately, this surgeon walked away, and another surgeon was persuaded to take up Dr. Pronovost's request. It turned out that the patient's intestine and pancreas had been punctured in the first surgery.

Enough examples--you get the story. Oh, one more. Did you know that estimates are that about 30% of the time physicians operate defibrillators incorrectly?

The point of Dr. Pronovost's book is not that surgeons, physicians or other health care professionals are intentionally careless. Rather, as Dr. Gawande notes in his book, medicine has become enormously complicated, and the more complicated things are, the greater the chance of errors. Further, the protocols addressing the ways medical professionals communicate with each other need to be adapted in order to solicit and use the best inputs and observations available.

One of the famous dictums applied to medicine is, "first, do no harm." That can be easier to say than to do, but with people like Dr. Pronovost and many other medical professionals dedicated to improving health care, the outlook for better care is growing better every day. Thanks for writing this book and sharing your insights, Dr. P.

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Contribution to Medicine! February 23, 2010

By Loyd E. Eskildson HALL OF FAME

Format:Hardcover

Peter Pronovost's father died early, primarily due to medical error; the 'good news' is that it galvanized Peter to ensure his own life made a contribution. He continued his education, becoming an M.D. and then carried on to become a researcher as well. Pronovost's PhD. dissertation summarized research on the value of intensivists (specially-trained ICU physicians) in hospital intensive-care units (ICUs) and found they reduced mortality by one-third, and length-of-stay as well. Soon after publishing his findings, providing ICU care via intensivists became medicine's 'gold standard' and spread across the nation. In 2008, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people on earth, and that same year he won a MacArthur ('genius grant') Fellowship. Not bad for someone only 43-years old. But there's more!

Overall it is estimated that patients receive barely 50% of recommended therapies and only about 30% of those are administered as recommended. This despite the U.S. spending more on health care than any other developed nation, while leaving some 40 million uncovered by insurance, and medical costs being a major cause of personal bankruptcy. The result of medical errors, Dr. Pronovost estimates, is that hundreds of thousands needlessly die each year. He became focused on quality improvement after a young patient died in his hospital due to a catheter-caused infection. Pronovost then led a team effort that first created a five-step checklist distilled from a 120-page CDC set of catheter placement guidelines and underlying rationale. This improved protocol compliance to 38%. Compliance was limited partly due to difficulty finding needed supplies. Making them available on a special cart improved compliance to 70% and infection rates fell - impressive advances over what previously had simply been viewed as an unavoidable 'cost of doing business.' However, Pronovost recognized both that this improvement was likely to go away without ongoing reinforcement, and that more could be done. A culture change was needed - not only to maintain and improve the initial gains, but to spread these helpful attitudes to improving areas not already covered by checklists.

Studying liability claims and substantially harmful errors at various hospitals led to his finding that in nearly 90% of instances a team member knew something was wrong, and either kept silent (probably had previously been chewed out for speaking up), or spoke up and was ignored - similar to research on pilot/co-pilot communications prior to aviation crashes. An O.R. teamwork survey was then conducted, and found that almost all the doctors involved thought teamwork was good, while more than half of the nurses thought it was poor. A standard improvement approach evolved:

1)Form an improvement team (physician, nurse, ancillary staff-member, senior administrator) to address a problem. Survey members on safety attitudes - at least a 60% response was required to proceed. Discuss examples of good and bad practice within the hospital in general, and the unit in particular. Create a checklist to direct future actions in the targeted area, preferably with 7 or fewer items, and educate staff on the rationale for selecting those items.

2)Identify and mitigate local barriers. Actions might include clarifying primary and backup responsibility, preventing conflicting goals (eg. between a cardiologist and nephrologist regarding a patient's fluid levels) using a patient 'goal sheet,' insuring needed supply availability, using physical marks to encourage compliance (eg. cardiac catheter tubing marked at 60 cm. to help prevent over-insertion; ICU beds marked at 30-degree incline to help optimize ventilator therapy; marking initial surgical-site incisions in advance), and emphasizing the importance of resolving conflicts according to maximizing patient benefit. (Doctors would not longer be deities.)

3)Measure and track performance; provide feedback to those involved. This was often a problem with newly participating hospitals, sometimes cured with extra funding from insurers, other times by hectoring and pleading.

4)Ensure that all patients reliably receive the recommended treatment. Pronovost helped accomplish this by providing the appropriate checklists to patients and their families, and providing staff with his phone # and/or that of a senior administrator for immediate contact in the event the someone refused to follow a checklist.

Results included a 50% improvement in safety-culture scores, a 50% decrease in ICU lengths-of-stay, a decrease in nurse turnover from 9% to 2%, a 60% reduction in adverse drug events, and a drop in ten-day central-line infection rates from 11% to 0%. Expanding his central-line checklist approach to Michigan hospitals saved an estimated 1,500 lives in the first 18 months - "more than any laboratory scientist in the past decade," per Atul Gawande, M.D. (Lab research attracts many in medicine, mundane administrative tasks such as checklists and performance feedback - not nearly so much.)

Bottom Line: "Our current approach to solving (medical) mistakes is nuts," says author Pronovost. It commonly involves a hospital identifying a safety problem and attempting to solve it by telling doctors and nurses to be more careful - an approach akin to what W. Edwards Deming panned ("management by exhortation") in the early 1950s as he guided Japanese manufacturers to quality excellence. Fortunately, eventually the aviation industry caught on, and later yet, now health care. The 'bad news' is that Pronovost's efforts are not immediately and enthusiastically accepted and implemented - doctors don't like being told what to do, are primarily paid only for performing insurance-reimbursable patient services, and typically are reimbursed extra for errors anyway (as are hospitals). Fortunately, we now have Dr. Pronovost's efforts at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Donald Berwick's at Harvard, Dr. Brent James' at Intermountain Healthcare, Dr. Atul Gawande's at Brigham and Womens, Dr. John Wennberg's at Dartmouth, Dr. Gary Yates' at Sentara, and others, backed by outside efforts at The Leapfrog Group for Patient Safety. However, these pioneers cannot reform health-care on their own. It is essential that health care reform legislation force substantial quality improvement and reduced costs (the two go together, as Dr. Deming proved decades ago, and we then use those savings to provide increased insurance coverage.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Smart applications of good management July 4, 2010

By Angie Boyter VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

As a book, it was a bit disappointing. Someone did a very poor job of editing; there were too many word, grammar, and punctuation errors to satisfy me. In addition, it is a prime example of a current fad in nonfiction that overemphasizes the "human" element in whatever subject is being discussed. The book opens, for example, with an extended recount of the admittedly very sad story of a little girl who died unnecessarily at Hopkins due to several shortcomings. This type of narrative continues throughout the book, including long discussions of Pronovost's experiences trying to get his ideas adopted.(How much of this was a literary technique and how much was ego I would not say without knowing the man.). There was way too much of this kind of thing at the expense of CONTENT.

That being said, there is a lot of good stuff here that applies equally well to safety, efficiency, and/or customer satisfaction in most fields, not just hospital care. The principles are the same, although different people express them differently. Pronovost's program has two aspects, TRIP and CUSP. Translating Research into Practice (TRIP) is the problem-solving part. It involves the checklists and other changes to practices, such as the simple idea of storing items often used together in the same cabinet and putting them close to the places where they are used, thereby both saving time and making it less likely that a busy provider will "not bother" with a particular safety item because it is too much trouble to go get it. Although the checklists are the item that grabbed attention, the other aspect, looking at an organization's specific procedures and making improvements, is also a component of CUSP. Every organization is different, and he does not give a lot of general guidance on how to approach this, although there are a number of standard techniques.

Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program (CUSP) is really just a particular implementation of Pronovost's second principle, that of establishing a collaborative culture. He recounts how the traditional hierarchical culture in health care puts the doctors at the top of the totem pole, with surgeons the most insistent on their authority. This can keep other members of the team, such as the nurses who usually spend the most time with the patients, from speaking up even when they see something wrong. It also makes health care professionals often discount observations from patients' family members, even though family, who know the patients best of all, may notice important deviations from the patient's norm that would not be obvious to the health care providers. Another factor of the culture change, although Pronovost does not address this directly, is sensitizing team members to notice small things in their routines that seem inefficient or unsafe and to raise these as issues to be addressed.

Another item that Pronovost emphasizes, which I heartily endorse, is the importance of collecting data and measuring results. From daily experience health care members may know what things at a macro level they want to improve, but data will tell them how bad the situation is, perhaps suggest the best places to start making changes, and let them know how successful the change was. Pronovost does not, however, give much in the way of tips on how to get the data you may want or need, which is often not a simple task.

Pronovost clearly is a real believer in what he does, and I love his message. Given that the book is 271 pages long, though, he would have been much more useful if he had included more general guidelines or suggestions on how to implement TRIP and CUSP in a given environment and less narrative about Pronovost's cross-country speaking and consulting engagements.