24,000 Memphis patients rated their doctors
The Healthy Memphis Common Table is an effort to help patients and providers take charge of improving the city’s health. It includes the results of about 24,000 patient ratings of 430 local primary care doctors, all conducted by the nonprofit Consumers’ Checkbook.
Manoj Jain, M.D., M.P.H., (bio) is on the table’s advisory committee and he, as part of its mission to publicize the effort, wrote a three-part series in the The (Memphis) Commercial Appeal on the results and potential of the survey. The first installment is the one with the broadest appeal, as it discusses survey results and consequences.
In the second installment, Jain profiles a highly rated doctor and includes his own musings on what makes a physician great. Jain then wraps up the series with anonymous profiles of two poorly rated doctors and further musings on how their ratings might be improved. Interestingly, Jain’s suggestions almost always focus on non-clinical factors such as office staff quality and communication skills.
Nursing blog marks anniversary of landmark report
In a two-week series of posts, the INQRI blog – the blog of the Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative – is recognizing the 10th anniversary of “To Err is Human,” the groundbreaking report that found that as many as 98,000 people die each year from medical errors in hospitals.
A nurse vaccinates a child in this CDC photo.
The latest post, written by Barbara Olson of Florence dot com, looks at the building blocks of better health care. She says that ten years of studying how to make health care reliable has revealed that “things like speaking clearly, repeating words to be certain they have been understood; taking turns; using “inside” voices; and getting plenty of rest matter when individuals rely on complex processes to deliver intended outcomes. (Even “time-outs” have made a comeback!)”
Earlier posts include a Q&A with Paul Levy, president and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston; one that warns that we may not have made much progress in the area of patient safety; and a post about a nurse researcher who has found that a positive work environment helps nurses catch errors before they harm patients.
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- How I did it: Falsified charts in nursing homes linked to patient care
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- Transparency & medical errors: Public reporting of patient harm is a potent force
