Year in Review: Healthcare Blunders and Successes on the Road to Improvement

This year has been a year of changes, of errors but also of successes. In review, I wanted to pinpoint on few of the ones related to the quality of healthcare provided, risk posed to the patient and employees as well as on safety related issues. It was a busy year for disease control:

1. The anthrax scare at the CDC

- in June, workers in a high-level biosecurity lab were preparing anthrax samples to be used for researching germs,

Top 3 Best QI Books in 2014

It is almost the end of 2014! As a recap of this year, I was thinking to have a post on the literature on quality improvement, with my top 3 of best reads in this category. In a previous post I was mentioning how quality improvement is a continuous process, where everybody is invested in learning and growing so that incremental improvement is achieved. And learning is an ongoing, crucial activity in improvement.

From all the books I have read on QI in 2014, here are my top 3 picks:

3.  On the Mend- Revolutionizing Healthcare to Save Lives and Transform the Industry by John Toussaint, M.D. 

Toussaint is the CEO of ThedaCare and one of the most important agents in adopting Lean principles in healthcare. This award winning book talks about how healthcare can be improved using proven principles of Lean management. It is full of examples from ThedaCare, a cathalyst centre for quality improvement and innovation in the US. 

Quote: "Patients are goldmines of customer feedback for healthcare improvement"