Correctional Health Care Patient Safety Handbook: Reduce Clinical Error, Manage Risk, and Improve Quality

Are you unintentionally harming your patients? Most of us entered health care to help those who are ill, injured, or suffering. Yet our patient care systems can get in the way, leading to patient harm instead of the quality care we intended. The Correctional Health Care Patient Safety Handbook provides practical evidence-based help to improve your clinical program and, thereby, reduce clinical error, managing risk and improving clinical quality. By reading this book, you will discover: • How a patient safety framework can reduce legal liability while enhancing continuous quality improvement efforts • The best methods to assess and improve an organizational culture to support patient safety • The key ways therapeutic systems support patient safety • Why communication and teamwork are so important for reducing clinical error • How to involve your patients to reduce errors and liability • The practitioner issues that can sink your clinical program and what to do about them This book is a must-read for anyone working in the correctional health care setting, but especially for those who have opportunity to create and improve systems of care such as: • Health Service Administrators • Medical Directors • Directors of Nursing • Risk Management Professionals • Operational Leaders From the Forward This book should be required reading for all health professionals working behind bars. Why? Because correctional health care is too often isolated from mainstream health care. As a result, practices behind bars do not always keep up. In the free-world community, patient safety practices have led to reduced morbidity and mortality. Correctional health professionals can use the same simple techniques toward the same end. Failure to do so can lead to pain and suffering (invisible to the public eye) and/or death. - Robert B. Greifinger, MD