Onward and Upward
I am so so grateful to have been given the opportunity to attend Patient Safety Camp. As the week progressed I started to wish that everyone could attend something like this; I will be highly recommending it when I get back to school. Since I know that everyone cannot attend Patient Safety Camp, I started thinking about how I could carry this information back to Indy and take with me wherever I go after that. My school has a Patient Safety elective (of which I am on the waitlist for), but beyond that we are given no formal training in the Patient Safety Culture. I’m going to sit down with my Integrative Medicine group e-board and see if we can get Patient Safety education to be one of our platforms. I’m likely jumping ahead of myself (as I often do) but we could do a series over the course of… Continue reading
From the Observation Deck
I love quick effective ways to learn. Within 1 hour I had learned a lot about communication and was already excited to recreate the scenario for other people the learn from. We played a game in which the 3 players were each assigned to a role of doctor, nurse, or administrator. There were varying levels of communication allowed, ranging from unidirectional to complete communication between both parties. The doctor then had to give instructions on how to construct a certain pattern of dominoes to the nurse. In all of the scenarios the doctor’s back had to be to the nurse. I learned a lot by playing each role but I was most surprised by my experience as administrator. The administrator just observed the interaction between the doctor and nurse and could give feedback at the end. While observing, I saw my team making errors. I quickly thought to myself “Uh-oh,… Continue reading
Psychological Safety
Psychological Safety: the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. During our break out session, we discussed barriers to transparency and I shared the experience I had with one of my attendings. On our first day with her she sat us all down and told us that this would be a safe environment for us to learn in and that we were encouraged to speak up if we didn’t know or understand something and that we could work on figuring it out together. Kathy pointed out that my attending had used some very nice psychological safety techniques to keep an open flow of communication. I had not necessarily heard of “psychological safety” as a term but I remember distinctly thinking I felt psychologically safe working with her. I also remember wishing that there were more attendings around like her because of (from the medical student perspective… Continue reading