Patients are the ultimate stakeholder. HRO should partner with us!

Last month I posted that I’d be participating in the 8th international conference on High Reliability Organizing (HRO). Today I participated in a breakout session where the moderator decided to “flip” the session, and start with Q&A, making the whole session audience generated on the fly. Woohoo!

I threw together a set of slides, which I started to present as time ran out. Here’s the whole set. It’s not a speech – it’s a set of topics that just ends.

I learned a ton at this event, from people who’ve worked on preventing disasters in other industries (aviation, firefighting, nuclear energy, etc). I hope to say much much more later about what I learned – this presentation was to people in HRO who aren’t familiar with the “patient as partner” idea.

One major new buzzword I picked up is situational awareness. I know aviation and military people are familiar with it – you can’t possibly perform reliably (do the right thing) in a situation if you don’t know what the situation is. But somehow, almost everywhere in medicine, clinicians too often disregard what patients and family are trying to tell them. We need to transform this – all of us.

Here are the slides. This evening I tweaked the slides – I’d said “most” organizations when I meant “few.”