Clinical Engineering Toolkits for Patient Safety Focus Investigations

摘要

Most industries and businesses are constantly trying to improve their business practices. In many cases these improvements are driven by competition or the desire for increased market share or an improvement in their financial picture. Although healthcare is not unique in this, it is one of the higher-profile industries in which improvements in operations result in a decrease in deaths or injuries. Very small changes, instituted at critical points in the business practice, can have a dramatic effect on patient outcomes and mortality rates.nnThe clinical engineering functions of these organizations are an integral part of this improvement process. Clinical engineers are frequently asked to participate in these improvement processes and it is incumbent on them to better understand some of the tools used to identify and analyze process changes.nnBy now, you have heard the terms FMEA and RCA used by your organization's Risk Management or Patient Safety Office, but you may be unsure of what the terms mean and how they might apply. FMEA stands for Failure Mode and Effect Analysis. RCA is an abbreviation for Root Cause Analysis. Both activities are routinely used in healthcare institutions as part of their quality improvement programs, but they have different purposes and are used to analyze quality issues from two different perspectives.nnUntil you are familiar with these two terms, they may seem to be interchangeable. While they have similarities, they are actually quite different in both their scope and the approach they take in dealing with errors. Both processes are used to help define the nature of an error and the details relating to it, but look at it from two different viewpoints.