Medicine, Botany, Faith (and not to mention Magic Potion!)
The Fastest Surgeon on Earth from Dr Getafix on Vimeo.
A little while back I posted about the challenges a family member faced after forgetting to bring their medications when they came to visit us. In that post, I referred to the Electronic Transfer of Prescriptions (eTP) and I’ve now taken a closer look at this system and discovered some useful features, but also significant room for improvement and expansion.
Continue reading “EHRs: Safety vs Privacy & the ETTO Principle”
Edit 18/5/2018: A follow-up to this post can be found here.
My parents, as they often do, came up to Newcastle and stayed for a few nights last week, and it ended up being a case study in Patient Work.
My mother left all her medications at home. I’m sure she’s not the first, and won’t be the last person to make this kind of skill-based error known as a “lapse”, but it immediately raised some obvious questions and issues that she, and others, had to go about solving, requiring significant amounts of time and mental effort which all contributed to her Patient Workload. Continue reading “Travelling, Medications and Patient Work”
There’s been yet another twist in my earlier story about trip to Sydney for a medical appointment a little while back. I popped into my pharmacist earlier this week to get a script filled and he casually asked me if wanted my final lot of Humira, which was the medication I was driving all over Sydney to try and get because I had run out. As it turned out, I had one more repeat than I had thought, and the pharmacist had filled it expecting me to come back and get it when I needed. This meant there was more Humira sitting in the pharmacy fridge in Newcastle waiting for me the whole time I was going going back and forth across Sydney!
Sigh…
In recent months the “Theatre Cap Challenge” has been picking up steam on Twitter & has had significant coverage on mainstream media as well. In case you’re wondering what all the fuss is about, you can check out my video in this post or check out the twitter feed below.
While it’s been great seeing this initiative gain momentum, it seems that a significant number of people are hitting a hurdle in adopting it because their hospital doesn’t allow reusable cloth caps citing infection control concerns. In Australia, the ACORN standard is usually cited as the reason for not allowing them, though not all hospitals are interpreting the standard in the same way, and the standard itself allows individual hospitals to develop their own policy on cloth caps.
Following my recent “discovery” of the concept of Patient Work, it has reframed the way I view all my interactions with the healthcare system such as doctors visits, taking medication, blood tests and scans and so on. I’ve decided I’m going to start describing and documenting some of these interactions primarily for my own interest, but also in case others find them interesting as well. What follows is an almost textbook example of some of the complexity and unpredictability of Patient Work, and the need for the Patient Work System to be resilient enough to cope with these variations and uncertainties
As part of my job, I have a monthly safety spot at our departmental M&M meetings. Here is a modified version of one of the presentations discussing the importance of knowing, and using, people’s names. If you would like to download a copy of the slides, you can do so here here.
What’s in a name? from Dr Getafix on Vimeo.
The “names-on-caps” idea came from Rob Hackett and then went viral after Alison Brindle started the hashtag #TheatreCapChallenge.
Following my recent post on Patient Work, I decided to do what i normally do when I want to research something and headed over to Twitter. I did a search using the hashtag #PatientWork and was surprised to discover that at that time (2/3/18) there was a total of only 25 tweets, the earliest one being from 2012. Furthermore, 5 of them were mine, and 7 were used in a sense that was unrelated to what I was interested in leaving only 13 of relevance to me that predated my interest in the topic! I think this confirms Holden’s opinion (quoted in my earlier post) that this area is under-represented in the HF/E area. I might have to see if I can do something about that!
One of the (many!) things I love about Human Factors/Ergonomics (HF/E) specialists is that a large chunk of their work involves studying, describing and naming “everyday” human experiences. So when I am listening to their presentations or reading their articles, it is not uncommon for me to have an “A-ha!” moment where they describe something that is very familiar to me. “Oh, that’s what that’s called!” or “Phew! I thought I was the only one that did that sort of thing!”. A relatively recent example of this for me was as at the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia conference (HFESA17) last year. This time, the everyday experience that now had a name was “Patient Work”. Continue reading “Patient Work”
I’m currently reading Daniel Kahneman‘s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” and while reading the chapter on the “availability heuristic”, a real-world example popped up in my news feed. To explore this further, consider the following question:
Please rank the following natural disasters in order of the number of deaths caused in Australia:
•Floods
•Heatwaves
•Cyclones
•Bushfires
