Total Systems Approach: A Blueprint for Patient Safety
Insights from our exclusive Member Masterclass with Dr Marcus Schabacker.
Over 600 Members registered for our latest Member Masterclass featuring Improvement Academy Director Associate Professor Bernie Harrison, and guest speaker, Dr Marcus Schabacker, CEO of Emergency Care Research Institute (ECRI). Dr Schabacker is a board-certified anaesthesiologist and intensive care specialist whose experience includes designing, transforming, and leading organisations of up to 4,000 employees across five continents to provide safe and effective products to patients and healthcare providers worldwide.
Titled a ‘Total Systems Approach to Patient Safety’, Dr Schabacker led thought-provoking discussions on the current state of patient safety in the United States and globally, calling for a new approach to redesign both clinical and safety operations.
Patient safety is an urgent and critical issue in healthcare. In high-income countries, it is estimated that one in every 10 patients is harmed while receiving hospital care, with unsafe medication practices and medication errors leading the cause of avoidable harm (WHO, 2023).
According to Dr Schabacker, failures should be seen as systemic issues rather than isolated incidents that occur only in direct patient interactions. A 'Total Systems Safety’ approach, as Dr Schabacker puts it, is an integrated approach that supports clinicians to deliver safer care. Safety should be designed into the work environment, tasks and processes, tools and technology as well as the organisation and people.
An actual event, an actual miss, is almost never the result of an individual failure. It is a series of events which leads up to that moment to be catastrophic.
- Dr Marcus Schabacker
Technology presents opportunities to create a safer healthcare environment for patients, but only with appropriate risk assessments. Dr Schabacker advocates for the idea that ‘technology should work for people, not the people work for technology’, from simplifying tasks, reducing administrative burdens on clinicians to ensuring that new systems are user-friendly and reliable.
We can't assume when we design our systems that the operator will execute it perfectly and flawlessly every single time. Hence, we need to design enough redundancies into our system.
- Dr Marcus Schabacker
We thank Dr Schabacker for his time and sharing insights on this important topic. You can access more Masterclasses like these on our e-Learning Platform. Simply register to access these insightful discussions.
Join our next Member Masterclass
Our Improvement Academy Director, Assoc Professor Bernie Harrison, will be in conversation with Dr Sarah Dalton on the topic of ‘Maximise your success in engaging all clinicians for quality and safety initiatives’. Click to register here
