Journal of the American Medical Association, August 17, 2005—Vol 294, No. 7
Clinical Crossroads, A 38-Year-Old Woman With Fetal Loss and Hysterectomy
Benjamin Sachs, MB, BS, discussant.
"Mrs W is a married, self-employed, healthy woman living in a community several hours from Boston. She has private health insurance. At age 38, she was admitted to the hospital for elective delivery of her first child, but the admission ended tragically with fetal loss, hysterectomy, and a prolonged hospitalization." (more)
Contemporary OB GYN, January 2006
Lessons from the cockpit: How team training can reduce errors on L&D,
Susan Mann, MD, Ronald Marcus, MD, and Benjamin Sachs, MB, BS
"Although many ob/gyns believe they already work on an interdisciplinary team, most don’t really apply the principles of teamwork on labor and delivery. This Harvard team has discovered that applying the concepts used by military and commercial flight teams—an approach called Crew Resource Management—can improve patient safety and reduce the epidemic of lawsuits plaguing the specialty." (more)
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality: Morbidity and Mortality Rounds on the Web,
March 2006
Team Training: Classroom Training vs. High-Fidelity Simulation
Stephen D. Pratt, MD and Benjamin P. Sachs, MB, BS
"In recent years, the medical community has reached a near-consensus that team training and Crew Resource Management (CRM) techniques can improve patient safety. However, the most effective way to teach and implement these concepts is much less clear." (more)
Grace Report on-line publication for OB GYN’s, December 19, 2005, Vol1, No 7
Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Tackles Errors in Labor & Delivery
Susan Mann, MD, and Penny Greenberg, RN
"When one of the nation’s flagship teaching hospitals turned to the aviation industry for lessons in how to reduce errors, many ob-gyns were skeptical. However, after adopting resource management and communication techniques from the U.S. military, ob-gyns at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts have used them cut malpractice claims and the number of adverse events in its labor and delivery unit." (more)
Grace Report on-line publication for OB GYN’s December 19, 2005, Vol 1, No 7
Study of OB Claims Triggers Move to Team-Based Care
Susan Mann, MD, and Penny Greenberg, RN
"In response to a particularly tragic case involving medical errors in 2000, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts decided on a radical course of action. It decided to explore how the decision-making processes used in aviation to reduce errors and accidents could be used in its labor and delivery unit. After studying 10 years of malpractice claims, in 2001 the hospital began training its ob-gyns and staff on these techniques. In the years since, there has been a noticable reduction in cases involving errors." (more)