Professor Alison Leary, Chair of Healthcare & Workforce Modelling, London South Bank University, delivers the James Reason lecture at the 2018 HSJ Patient Safety Congress on work force and safety and discusses the complexity of demand.
The report from The Leapfrog Group analyses eight high-risk procedures to determine which hospitals and surgeons perform enough of them to minimise the risk of patient harm or death, and whether hospitals actively monitor to assure that each surgery is necessary. The report finds that the vast majority of participating hospitals do not meet The Leapfrog Group’s minimum hospital or surgeon volume standards for safety nor do they have adequate policies in place to monitor for appropriateness. Rural hospitals are particularly challenged in meeting the standards.
Leapfrog advises "given the variation in patient outcomes between higher-volume and lower-volume hospitals, the importance of patients using Leapfrog results to select a hospital for these high-risk procedures cannot be overstated."