Southeast Georgia Health System is the first Health System or hospital
in Georgia to implement the revolutionary program LifeWings®—a
patient safety training program designed by professional pilots, astronauts,
and physicians to eliminate preventable errors in health care institutions.
The program has been sited for improving patient safety at such nationally
known institutions as Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn.
According to Amy Wasdin, RN, director of Risk Management, the first phase
of team member training is complete and the program has already been rolled
out in the Brunswick Campus Maternity Care Center and Surgical Services
departments at the Brunswick Campus. “Patient care providers in
those areas, including 64 physicians, took the four-hour training sessions
as well as teamwork skills workshops,” Wasdin says. “The training
will be on-going and we plan on implementing the program System-wide,
including our Camden Campus and other facilities.”
LifeWings® Partners LLC was first developed by a former U.S. Navy Top
Gun instructor and a commercial airline pilot and specializes in applying
aviation-based teamwork training and safety tools in response to a report
by the Institute of Medicine in 2000 that highlighted the need for better
training in the medical errors and fatalities. The report estimated there
are somewhere between 44,000 and 98,000 preventable deaths in the United
States annually due to preventable error.
“They take aviation safety principals and apply them to health care
situations,” Wasdin says. ‘It teaches you to speak up.’
The program really emphasizes the mantra: See it, Say Fix it. If you see
a potential problem you bring it out in the open to everyone’s attention.”
The aviation safety principals used by LifeWings® were put into place
in the late 1980s when aviation industry experts and researchers realized
that the primary “root cause” of commercial airline crashes
was not because of the technical incompetence of pilots and crews, or
mechanical failure. Seventy to 80% of fatal accidents were due to teamwork
failures among the crew and although new technology in aircraft cockpits
seemed to help, each new piece of technology initiated a new source of
human error.
“LifeWings® emphasizes a team approach and is allowing us to
develop tools and checklists to improve patient safety, efficiency, as
well as team member morale,” says T. Wayne Rentz Jr., MD, Brunswick
Campus Chief of Staff. “It’s very empowering to a staff member
when a physician says to him or her ‘if you see something you think
is wrong, I expect you to speak up.’”
The program also stresses red flags to look for that could lead to preventable
patient safety mistakes. Wasdin says these red flags include things such
as miscommunication, conflicting information, confusion, fatigue, and
stress. “We expect to provide the safest environment possible for
our patients by following the LifeWings’ program and increase the
satisfaction of our team members and physicians,” Wasdin says.
According to the LifeWings® Web site, those are the results health
care institutions that are using the program have reported including a
ten fold improvement in error rates, a 43% improvement in observed to
expected mortality rates, greater employee satisfaction, reduced turnover,
50% reductions in surgical counts errors, and improvements in pre-procedure
antibiotic administration. To learn more about LifeWings, visit www.saferpatients.com.
For more information about Southeast Georgia Health System, visit www.sghs.com.