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LEFT: Rebecca Mercier, MD; Anju Suhag, MD; and Stuart Weiner, MD, listen during an OB Report. ABOVE: Third-year resident Shannon Davids, MD (far right), leads the morning OB Report. Listening from left are Zubairul Aghai, MD; Sandeep Sadashiv, MD; Angela Soper, MD ’13; Georgia Cavalli, MD; and fourth-year medical student Megan Savage. Photos by Sabina Pierce.
in a closed space. Residents, anesthesiologists, neonatal and obstetrics attendings, the nurses in labor and delivery and on the ante-natal floor, even senior hospital leadership completed training sessions designed to create tools that would improve patient safety in the department. “The groups in training created projects to work on based on the processes they use every day,” says Claudette Fonshell, patient safety and clinical outcomes coordinator. “They identified opportunities for improvement and created tools to meet their specific concerns.”
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Obstetrics Safety Tools
as high levels of individual competence and training.” LifeWings is also certified in TeamSTEPPS (Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety), which was developed by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Patient Safety Program in collaboration with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. TeamSTEPPS is changing the culture of the medical profession by empowering every member of the care team to take ownership for clinical outcomes and patient safety.
Team training began in obstetrics in January 2012, with the implementation of some of the new team-based projects in May. “LifeWings has redefined and reinforced our culture of safety and provides the structure and language to make us better able to put safety at the highest rung of the ladder of all the things we do,” says William Schlaff, MD, the Paul A. and Eloise B. Bowers Professor and chair of the department. Launching a major safety program in obstetrics made sense because it is a closed group, with dedicated physicians, nurses and staff treating specific patients
OB Report. Replacing multiple separate report-out sessions, these twice-daily standardized sessions ensure that everyone starts the shift prepared. Led by the OB resident, the report starts with an introduction of who is on the team, followed by a review of what’s going on in the unit (ante-partum and post-partum), and who has concerns for the day, which range from individual patient care to equipment and staffing. The report ends with a reminder that team members are expected to speak up if there are any patient safety concerns.
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Post-Partum Report. When a patient goes to the post-partum unit, a standard script of information is communicated to the staff so that everyone on the team has the information needed to provide the best standard of care.