Having only been at Telluride Experience: #AELPS11 for a day, I hadn’t imagined I would have learned so much. We covered a variety of topics with important patient safety learning points. I am so grateful for the opportunity to be here and share the experience with so many motivated individuals keen to be change agents.
I wanted to focus on one of the key moments for me: The Story of Lewis Blackman (http://qsen.org/faculty-resources/videos/the-lewis-blackman-story/). We were very lucky to have Helen Haskell (Lewis Blackman’s Mother) with us and I am so grateful to her for sharing her story. So many issues were raised during the video and I was able to draw many parallels to health care in the UK. For example, the issue of reduced staffing levels on the weekend (see link). The consequences of this can be severe as was found in a study published in the BMJ, Day of week procedure and 30 day mortality for elective surgery… where patients undergoing planned surgery were more likely to die if they have their operation at the end of the week. The new plans proposed by Jeremy Hunt (Health Secretary) to increase staffing provision at the weekend in the UK are causing much controversy, recently culminating in the hashtag #IminworkJeremy (staff posting pictures of themselves at work at the weekend).
Another issue I wanted to focus on may seem rather obvious, but as a student I believe is one of the easiest things to incorporate in daily practice; the importance of health care professionals and students introducing themselves fully to patients. In the story of Lewis Blackman, there was a lack of communication and identification of the team involved in the care of Lewis. As a result his family were unaware of who best to raise issues with. There is so much to learn from this story but I want to end reflecting on Dr Kate Granger’s hashtag #HelloMyNameIs campaign. On her blog she describes herself as a doctor and terminally ill cancer patient musing about life and death (Click here for story). She has done remarkable work in encouraging health care staff to introduce themselves to patients, with support from over 400,000 staff in over 90 health organisations including many NHS trusts. Only recently did I see a lot of the standard hospital name badges at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust (where I train as a medical student at King’s College London) being replaced with bright and colourful #HelloMyNameIs name badges. Although it may sound simple, the impact on the patient experience is phenomenal.