Safety in healthcare has been around for a really long time. Florence Nightingale is sometimes referred to as "the mother of patient safety" because of her attention to healthcare design. In the 1800's, she advocated for improved ventilation and sanitary conditions. She also addressed overcrowding and nutrition, check patients at night and believed in education and spreading knowledge to improve care. Her new way of thinking about patient safety and advances over time have lead to safer healthcare environments. But, safety in healthcare continues to evolve from being something professionals do for patients to now including the need for patients to fulfilling their responsibilities for better care.
Existing safety thinking in healthcare is to eliminate all accidents, failures and injuries. It involves identifying what went wrong and implementing fixes to make sure it doesn't happen again. This includes imagining the ideal for how doctors, nurses and other staff provide care to each and every patient. But, there is some though that it might be time to step back and reflect ... and consider that patients are all different and how they experience disease, injury, illness also differs.
The new way of thinking, Safety II, is that there will be times where flexibility and adjustments will be needed to ensure that every patient is safe. The conditions of work and people change. How care is delivered to one patient with diabetes, may not be the care needed by another patient who also has a heart condition and can't read. Or consider a young woman who is pregnant for the first time and also battling a mental health condition and obesity; compared to a relatively healthy young mother pregnant with another child.
What this means for consumers of healthcare, patients and family caregivers is that we too must realize that adjustments to the care process must sometimes be made to accommodate the variation that comes from our differences. The patient or family caregiver role is also to speak up and communicate how we are different and how the care may need to be adjusted to match our circumstances. The video below provides some ideas for identifying when flexibility and adjustments may need to be made with your care... or even your own activities so that recovery isn't jeopardized.
The next time you visit your doctor or receive other healthcare services, consider how you and your needs might be different and talk to the staff about adjustments and flexibility that might be needed.
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