The inspiring story of how a leading innovator in patient safety found a simple way to save countless lives. First, do no harm-doctors, nurses and clinicians swear by this code of conduct. Yet in hospitals and doctors' offices across the country, errors are made every single day - avoidable, simple mistakes that often cost lives. Inspired by two medical mistakes that not only ended in unnecessary deaths but hit close to home, Dr. Peter Pronovost made it his personal mission to improve patient safety and make preventable deaths a thing of the past, one hospital at a time. Dr. Pronovost began with simple improvements to a common procedure in the ER and ICU units at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Creating an easy five-step checklist based on the most up-to-date research for his fellow doctors and nurses to follow, he hoped that streamlining the procedure itself could slow the rate of infections patients often died from. But what Dr. Pronovost discovered was that doctors and nurses needed more than a checklist: the day-to-day environment needed to be more patient-driven and staff needed to see scientific results in order to know their efforts were a success. After those changes took effect, the units Dr. Pronovost worked with decreased their rate of infection by 70%. Today, all fifty states are implementing Dr. Pronovost's programs, which have the potential to save more lives than any other medical innovation in the past twenty-five years. But his ideas are just the beginning of the changes being made by doctors and nurses across the country making huge leaps to improve patient care. In Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals, Dr. Pronovost shares his own experience, anecdotal stories from his colleagues at Johns Hopkins and other hospitals that have made his approach their own, alongside comprehensive research-showing readers how small changes make a huge difference in patient care. Inspiring and thought provoking, this compelling book shows how one person with a cause really can make a huge difference in our lives.

"The tough-minded and revealing story of a leading doctor's crusade against medical harm...Fascinating reading." -Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto. First, do no harm. Doctors, nurses, and clinicians swear by this code of conduct. Yet, medical errors are made every single day-avoidable mistakes that often cost lives. Inspired by two such mistakes, Dr. Peter Pronovost made it his personal mission to improve patient safety and make preventable deaths a thing of the past, one hospital at a time. Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals shows how Dr. Pronovost started a revolution by creating a simple checklist that standardized a common ICU procedure. His reforms are being implemented in all fifty states and have saved hundreds of lives by cutting hospital-acquired infection rates by 70%. Atul Gawande profiled Dr. Pronovost's reforms in a New Yorker article and his bestselling book The Checklist Manifesto is based upon Dr. Pronovost's success in patient safety. But Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals is the real story: an inspiring, thought-provoking, accessible insider's narrative about how doctors and nurses are improving patient care for all Americans, today.

Winner of the 2009 ACHE James A. Hamilton Book of the Year Award! "This book is a tour de force, and no one but John Nance could have written it. Only he could have made sophisticated, scientifically disciplined instruction about the nature and roots of safety into a page-turner. Medical care has a ton yet to learn from the decades of progress that have brought aviation to unprecedented levels of safety, and, in instructing us all about those lessons, John Nance is not just a bridge-builder he is the bridge." --Donald M. Berwick, MD, MPP, President and CEO, Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI)

"The tough-minded and revealing story of a leading doctor's crusade against medical harm...Fascinating reading." -Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto. First, do no harm. Doctors, nurses, and clinicians swear by this code of conduct. Yet, medical errors are made every single day-avoidable mistakes that often cost lives. Inspired by two such mistakes, Dr. Peter Pronovost made it his personal mission to improve patient safety and make preventable deaths a thing of the past, one hospital at a time. Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals shows how Dr. Pronovost started a revolution by creating a simple checklist that standardized a common ICU procedure. His reforms are being implemented in all fifty states and have saved hundreds of lives by cutting hospital-acquired infection rates by 70%. Atul Gawande profiled Dr. Pronovost's reforms in a New Yorker article and his bestselling book The Checklist Manifesto is based upon Dr. Pronovost's success in patient safety. But Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals is the real story: an inspiring, thought-provoking, accessible insider's narrative about how doctors and nurses are improving patient care for all Americans, today.

We're a nation in love with the drama of the medical world—from fast-paced hospital life to the race to discover cures for diseases. In Smart Medicine, William Hanson brings to life the fascinating true world of doctors and nurses and reveals the revolutionary changes that will soon be sweeping through the medical community: pharmacies that double as walk-in clinics; health services that will be delivered online; electronic records that hold the history of every drug or blood test you ever took. You might go to a genome specialist to identify the ticking time bomb in your genes, or you might show a rash to your doctor via videophone from thousands of miles away. The plethora of new options will change the way you and your doctor make decisions. Sophisticated yet written in easily accessible language, this is a penetrating look at the new world of medicine.

"A godsend for concerned friends and relatives trying to rein in the chaos."-The New York Times Whether you're addressing the rising chaos of a pandemic or preparing for a scheduled surgery, having checklists prepared to guide you through a hospital visit can often mean the difference between comfort and pain, personal and distant care--and even life or death. In today's hospital system, you can face a series of perplexing obstacles to satisfactory care, from overworked healthcare providers to understaffed facilities--which are heightened in times of crisis. You need to know how to take charge of your own healthcare; Elizabeth Bailey shows you how to do just that with a series of essential, easy-to-use checklists to better manage, monitor, and participate in your own healthcare, including: Before You Go, What to Bring, Master Medication List, Discharge Plan, and more. It is more important than ever to have a protocol, including a detailed plan for hygiene and communications while hospitalized. You can trust the medical staff, but you also need to trust yourself or a loved one to be your own best advocate. Newly revised and completely up-to-date, The Patient's Checklist shows you how.

This guide provides a step-by-step explanation of how to use the Safe Hospitals Checklist, and how the evaluation can be used to obtain a rating of the structural and nonstructural safety, and the emergency and disaster management capacity, of the hospital. The results of the evaluation enable hospital's own safety index to be calculated. The Hospital Safety Index tool may be applied to individual hospitals or to many hospitals in a public or private hospital network, or in an administrative or geographical area. In some countries, such as Moldova, all government hospitals have been evaluated using the Hospital Safety Index. In this respect, the Hospital Safety Index provides a useful method of comparing the relative safety of hospitals across a country or region, showing which hospitals need investment of resources to improve the functioning of the health system. The purpose of this Guide for Evaluators is to provide guidance to evaluators on applying the checklist, rating a hospital's safety and calculating the hospital's safety index. The evaluation will facilitate the determination of the hospital's capacity to continue providing services following an adverse event, and will guide the actions necessary to increase the hospital's safety and preparedness for response and recovery in case of emergencies and disasters. Throughout this document, the terms "safe" or "safety" cover structural and nonstructural safety and the emergency and disaster management capacity of the hospital. The Hospital Safety Index is a tool that is used to assess hospitals' safety and vulnerabilities, make recommendations on necessary actions, and promote low-cost/high-impact measures for improving safety and strengthening emergency preparedness. The evaluation provides direction on how to optimize the available resources to increase safety and ensure the functioning of hospitals in emergencies and disasters. The results of the evaluation will assist hospital managers and staff, as well as health system managers and decision-makers in other relevant ministries or organizations in prioritizing and allocating limited resources to strengthen the safety of hospitals in a complex network of health services. It is a tool to guide national authorities and international cooperation partners in their planning and resource allocation to support improvement of hospital safety and delivery of health services after emergencies and disasters. Over the past three years, the expert advice of policy-makers and practitioners from disciplines, such as engineering, architecture and emergency medicine, has been compiled, reviewed and incorporated into this second edition of the Guide. Global and regional workshops and virtual consultations have enabled technical and policy experts to contribute to the revision of Hospital Safety Index until consensus was reached on the content for its publication and distribution. Further comments and observations are certain to arise as the Hospital Safety Index continues to be applied across the world and these experiences will enable us to improve future editions. The rapid diagnostic application of the Hospital Safety Index provides, as a comparison, an out-of-focus snapshot of a hospital: it shows enough of the basic features to allow evaluators to confirm or disprove the presence of genuine risks to the safety of the hospital, and the hospital's level of preparedness for the emergencies and disasters to which it will be expected to provide health services in the emergency response. The Hospital Safety Index also takes into account the hospital's environment and the health services network to which it belongs. This second version of the second edition was released in December 2016.