``First Do No Harm'' is the Order of the Day for VA Patient Safety Program.ANN ARBOR Ann Arbor, city (1990 pop. 109,592), seat of Washtenaw co., S Mich., on the Huron River; inc. 1851. It is a research and educational center, with a large number of government and industrial research and development firms, many in high-technology fields such as , Mich. -- For more than five years, VA National Center for Patient Safety (NCPS NCPS National Center for Patient Safety NCPS National Crime Prevention Strategy NCPS North Carolina Poetry Society NCPS National Commission on the Public Service NCPS Nuclear Contingency Planning System NCPS Neural Cellular Positioning System ) has led the Department of Veterans Affairs Veterans Affairs is a term of the business that deals with the relation between a government and its veteran communities, usually administered by the designated government agency. patient safety efforts, developing practical and effective methods to overcome challenges noted in the 1999 Institute of Medicine's landmark report on patient safety, To Err is Human "To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System" is a groundbreaking report issued in 2000 by the U.S. Institute of Medicine which resulted in an increased awareness of U.S. medical errors. The push for patient safety that followed its release currently continues. . "We're proud that VA began addressing the patient safety challenge well before the IOM IOM See: Index and Option Market report was published," said NCPS Director Dr. James Bagian said. "We've aggressively developed and deployed systems that are in use throughout VA and have been adopted as a benchmark by healthcare organizations throughout the world." The report challenged medical professionals to break "the cycle of inaction in·ac·tion n. Lack or absence of action. inaction Noun lack of action; inertia Noun 1. " by developing a comprehensive approach to patient safety. It also called for patient safety programs to be evaluated after five years to determine what progress had been made to make healthcare safer. "Veterans should be proud of what has been done these past five years to improve patient safety across VA," said Bagian. "We have an unwavering commitment to reduce or eliminate inadvertent harm to patients resulting from their care." The VA program is based upon a systems approach to problem solving problem solving Process involved in finding a solution to a problem. Many animals routinely solve problems of locomotion, food finding, and shelter through trial and error. , focused on prevention, not punishment. Adverse medical events rarely occur from a single cause or from one person's actions. Such events are caused by the complex and dynamic interaction of a multi-faceted healthcare system. "Patient safety programs focused exclusively on eliminating errors will fail," said Bagian. "The real goal of a patient safety program should be to prevent harm to patients by taking a critical look at patient healthcare systems and designing them to be fault-tolerant." Fault-tolerant patient care systems are designed to prevent patient harm from individual error. "The fault-tolerance principle has been used for years by the aviation industry and other high-reliability organizations when designing systems," said Bagian, a former astronaut astronaut, crew member on a U.S. manned spaceflight mission; the Soviet term is cosmonaut. Candidates for manned spaceflight are carefully screened to meet the highest physical and mental standards, and they undergo rigorous training. . "And the high-reliability industries' safety records far surpass those of healthcare." Established in 1999, NCPS is part of the Veterans Healthcare System, the largest integrated healthcare system in the nation. Patient safety managers at VA's 158 hospitals and patient safety officers at 21 VA regional headquarters actively participate in the program. Learn more about NCPS: http://www.patientsafety.gov/ ; about VA: http://www.va.gov/ |
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