| New OR Lifewings like a preflight check |
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By: By ERIN EDGEMON Business Editor
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Before an airplane can takeoff from the airport, the flight crew must complete a specific set of procedures and a preflight checklist.
The same type of precision is being brought to Middle Tennessee Medical Center's operating rooms through Lifewings — a management-training program designed by professional aviators to eliminate preventable errors in healthcare institutions.
"Lifewings will help us to have a more refined standardized process from the beginning of the surgical services to the end," said Roberta Rogers, director of surgical services at MTMC.
The training supports the processes MTMC already does, she said. Some of these processes will begin weeks before a patient's surgery.
MTMC is one of only 45 healthcare institutions across the country to enlist the services of Lifewings since it launched around seven years ago. The Murfreesboro hospital currently building a new 216-bed facility on Medical Center Parkway is halfway through its four-month training.
"This is just one of many quality improvement activities that any hospital could pursue," said Ryan Simpson, vice president of operations at MTMC.
"As our surgical services department is growing we need to find ways to be more efficient," he continued, "and as we want to be more efficient we want to do it in the safest ways possible. We have found that Lifewings brought a balance to both of those things: safety and efficiency."
The Lifewings training program was formed based on a 2000 report released by the Institute of Medicine that showed a need for better medical training to reduce preventable medical error and fatalities, according to the Lifewings' Web site. The report stated between 44,000 and 98,000 preventable deaths occurred in the U.S. due to preventable errors.
In the Lifewings' program, healthcare workers are taught better teamwork and communicative skills; given standardization processes and checklists; and given tools to measure results.
About 200 MTMC surgeons, secretaries, orderlies, managers and other physicians and staff are going through the Lifewings' training. The new procedures should be implemented sometime in June.
"We expect more efficiency, the safest processes as possible, increased physician satisfaction and increased staff satisfaction," Simpson said of the expected results of the training.
Healthcare institutions that have utilized Lifewings have reported such successes, according to the Lifewings' Web site, as a ten-fold improvement in error rates; a 43 percent improvement in observed to expected mortality rates; greater employee satisfaction; 50 percent reduction in surgical errors; greater employee satisfaction; and improvements in pre-procedure antibiotic administration.
Murfreesboro resident Rhea Seddon, a Vanderbilt physician and former NASA space shuttle astronaut, is a Lifewings partner. Former MTMC chief of staff Warren McPherson is a Lifewings consultant.
Erin Edgemon can be reached at 869-0812 and at eedgemon@murfreesboropost.com.
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