Do you remember what the first day of school felt like? Awkward.
I could feel my classmates’ eyes staring through me. In my mind, they were omniscient about every subject from the multiplication and periodic tables to the exact function of each branch of the the US government. It’s amazing that you can still conjure up those emotions as an adult, but it’s exactly how I felt when I attended my first TeamSTEPPS training course.
It was the first morning of a two-day seminar. To say I was “anxious” is an understatement. As I entered the conference room, filled with physicians, nurses and administrators from around the country, sheer panic set in. And that was before I was handed a six-pound TeamSTEPPS manual with my name on it.
In case you aren’t familiar with TeamSTEPPS, it stands for Team Strategies & Tools to Enhance Performance & Patient Safety. It’s an evidence-based program that was developed as part of an ongoing effort to reduce the number of deaths associated with medical errors. It’s about changing the culture within the medical field and focusing on patient-centered care. Since 2005, Contrast Creative, a medical communications company, has collaborated with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and its partners, including Health Research Educational Trust (HRET), to create educational tools for this and other patient safety programs.
It was shortly after I began my position as an Associate Producer at Contrast Creative that I began working with Dr. Karen Frush, a national expert on patient safety and Contrast Creative’s esteemed medical consultant, on my first TeamSTEPPS program. We, along with Creative Director Kathleen McDonald, wrote scripts together that served as educational video modules within the TeamSTEPPS toolkit.
Getting up to speed on this progressive program was an undertaking. Thankfully, Dr. Frush invited me to attend a Master Trainer Course hosted by the Duke University Health System’s Patient Safety Office to gain insight. At any given time there are somewhere between 800 to 1,000 medical professionals on the waiting list to take this course. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. All I knew is that I was willing to take advantage of an opportunity to grow in my knowledge and understanding.
At the time, it was kind of like being dropped into a foreign country, and I didn’t speak the same language. The instructors began with a discussion about the 1999 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report on medical errors. The conversation quickly turned to the current state of healthcare followed by examples of the most widely publicized errors that still occurred years after that report was released.
At Contrast Creative, we often produce patient stories where successful outcomes are the norm. But on this day, I learned that as many as 44,000 to 98,000 deaths occur each year as a result of medical errors.
I was immediately struck by the tragedy of those patients whose stories don’t come with a fairytale ending.
Tiffany Christensen is a patient advocate at Duke University Hospital, and she is also a patient. Born with cystic fibrosis, Tiffany has undergone not one, but two double lung transplants in her lifetime. Tiffany shared her patient experience, which was marred by medical errors, with conference attendees. She wasn’t just a statistic; she was a real person whose life was put a risk more than once.
As we worked our way through the heavy manual, I was awestruck by the honesty of my fellow attendees who began sharing medical error stories of their own. These were medical professionals who by attending this conference were making a commitment to improve patient safety within their hospital or organization. They were going to go back to their workplaces and share the TeamSTEPPS program materials with their colleagues in a united effort to prevent mistakes. On that day, I became as invested in preventing medical errors as each person in that room.
Of course, Dr. Frush must have known the lasting impact the TeamSTEPPS course would have on me. According to Dr. Frush, “A lot of times patients and families who come to the hospital assume we’ll provide safe care, and that is, without question, what every doctor, every nurse wants to do. But when you think about medicine today – it’s really complex; there are a lot of things that can go wrong. So the work that we’re doing to find simple tools that we know can work to make care safer, I can’t think of anything better.”
I can’t think of anything better either! TeamSTEPPS is a powerful solution to improving patient safety through communication and teamwork. I’m proud and honored to work with AHRQ and its partners, Dr. Frush and the entire Contrast Creative team on a program that is aimed at creating and sustaining a culture of safety for patients.
Click here to learn more about the TeamSTEPPS program: TEAMSTEPPS Instructor Video Training Tools. Go behind-the-scenes with Contrast Creative on the latest TeamSTEPPS production.