What's all this about then?

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Hello,
Thanks for reading this

I am a UK Consultant in Emergency Medicine. I work in the NHS, with all it's great bits, less great bits and frustrations. In my practice I see lots of amazing care, but I also sometime see or hear about things that don't go so well.

Healthcare is by its nature a risky business with EM at the further extremes of even that. Making life changing decisions, in minutes with zero previous patient information in a high intensity environment 24/7 is bound to result in the occasional error. No one expects doctors not to make mistakes, although sometimes reading the press you wonder, but what is also equally true is making the same mistake twice is stupid. Learning from errors is vital. In fact most experienced doctors would say that they have learned most from errors they have made or seen. 

However .........

Most UK EM teams are made up of a variety of staff in which most of the doctors rotate anywhere from yearly to every 4 months. So how do you let this lot of doctors know about the errors of the previous lot?
How do we stop an error being made in 2013 that was previously made in 2009?
How do you try to inform all your staff in a timely way...especially when there's a couple of hundred of them?
Can you put a wiser head on younger shoulders?
How do we truly learn from the errors of the past?

Can we move to an NHS based on Don Berwick? Berwick Report

• ●  Place the quality and safety of patient care above all other aims for the NHS. (This, by the way, is your safest and best route to lower cost.) 
  

This blog will try to share learning, improve safety and lower risk by bringing cases based on real ones into a more open forum. None of it will be rocket science, although occasionally it will be brain surgery.

It's intended that by sharing errors, we can share learning. And by sharing learning we can do less harm

“Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error”

Cicero

Who?