I watched MLA's Keeping Patients Safe: Roles for Information Professionals webcast yesterday and I was interested in what others who also watched it thought.

Here are my thoughts:
Too much time was spend on background information. Three quarters of broadcast was dedicated to the definition of patient safety, history of patient safety, and culture of safety, specific hospital success stories. Only with a 1/2 hour left in the program did we get to hear about the role of the librarian in patient safety.

Since the title was Keeping Patients Safe: Roles for Information Professionals, I would have thought the librarian role would have had a greater share of the program time. I was interested in the hospital success stories they were interesting, but they did not illustrate how the librarian's role (or the information professional's role) helped these hospitals in creating a successful patient safety initiative.

MLA's participant's manual was extremely frustrating. The presentations in the manual were not in the order presented, and many presenters completely skipped slides, pages, and jumped around within the manual. For example, Peter Angood's presentation did not follow any of his slides in the manual at all. He was the lead of presenter and his material was in the middle of the manual and did not match any of the slides he was showing on screen. It caused a lot of grumbling and confused flipping of pages at the view location.

I did learn a lot of things.

Many hospitals, departments, and organizations used to and still sometimes view safety issues as isolated incidents within a specific department and person. In reality it is an institutional wide issue and there had to be a series of many perfect failures within many departments and people to lead to the adverse event. It is the "Swiss Cheese Model of Adverse Event Causation," the holes (errors) of each slice of swiss cheese (departments) line up perfectly so that one can draw a straight line of errors through to the patient causing harm.

Ways librarians can help with patient safety:

• Continue to promote Evidence Based Medicine practice through literature searches.
• Work with your hospital's IRB committee to become the expert searcher. For example at Eastern Virginia Medical School the librarians serves as Ex-Officio member who attends IRB meetings and conducts expert searches and provides information research support. If I remember correctly Judith Robinson mentioned that the librarian takes her laptop to the IRB meetings and can run searches while there. This type of librarian IRB position can be used to help prevent tragedies similar to the Johns Hopkins 2001 tragedy where Ellen Roche (healthy 24 yr. old volunteer) of a failure to do a complete literature search on the drug administered.
• Have an active role in Consumer Health information. All webcast presenters agreed that patients must become a part of the health care process, taking an active part in their care and safety as well. As librarians we can help patients find more information about their conditions to make informed decisions and have informed questions with their providers.
• Help patients and hospital employees with the glut of information. There is a ton of information available on every condition (some good information and some bad). There is no way anybody memorize it all. Librarians are excellent at managing large amounts of information. Teach patients and employees the skills necessary to manage the large quantity of information.
• Professional networking is another way for librarians with patient safety. Get to know your hospital's plan for safety and get to know who your patient safety people are in the hospital. Take them out to lunch, ask them how you can help them, get them to know you as well.
  

While I did learn a lot of things, I was very disappointed that the time devoted to how librarians can become involved in patient safety was so little. I would love to hear other librarian's thoughts on the webcast.