New program joins Wharton, docs

Members of Penn's medical staff are out to prove the old saying, "It's never too late to learn."

Having attended nursing school, medical school and in some cases, graduate school, simply isn't enough for these 42 nurses, physicians and other staffers who signed up to participate in the first annual Patient Safety Leadership Academy Executive Program.

Organized by Penn's Surgery Department, the Wharton School and the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, and funded by the Philadelphia Health Care Trust, the purpose of the multi-disciplinary program is to expose medical experts to ideas in management.

"The goal here is to provide the safest possible environment for patients... we want to train leaders" in patient safety, said Larry Kaiser, chairman of the Department of Surgery, and board member of PSLA.

"It's mostly nurses and doctors in this program, people who haven't had a lot of experience with management," said Thomas Conahan, an Anesthesia Department faculty member and program participant.

That's where Wharton comes in.

The "experts in executive education," as Kaiser calls them, serve as instructors for those in medicine, helping them hone their leadership, communication and management skills.

Penn Surgery and Wharton aren't complete strangers -- they've offered a joint course in management for surgeons for two years now, Kaiser said.

This new program begins with a three-day session of courses tomorrow through Sunday and continues throughout the academic year with periodic workshops and speakers.

In addition to seminars on patient safety, the PSLA executive program also includes speeches on decision making under uncertainty, negotiations and project management.

Conahan said that from the program, he hopes to get a "better grasp of the bigger picture in the operating room," as well as "a little more experience and ideas about management."

According to the Health Systems spokeswoman Rebecca Harmon, the nature of this program fits in well with the University's larger goals.

"It's part of what Dr. Rodin and the dean want -- the interdisciplinary cooperation," she said.

Patient safety and developing programs to promote it "became more of an issue four or five years ago, since the Institute of Medicine report," Kaiser said.

The 1999 Institute of Medicine report, entitled, "The Urgent Need to Improve Health Care Quality," noted rather ominously that "At its best, health care in the United States is superb. Unfortunately, it is often not at its best."

Later that year, the IOM published another report titled, "To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System," in which a 50 percent reduction in errors in the next five years is set as a goal.

Some of the challenges to patient safety, according to Kaiser, include leaving foreign objects in the patient after surgery, operating on the wrong site and those treated with medication receiving incorrect dosages.

Penn Medicine has already taken steps towards better patient safety measures. For example, Kaiser said, several years ago the Health System hospitals began using a computerized system to prescribe drugs for patients. This way, precautions against harmful combinations of drugs could be programmed in ahead of time.

Kaiser also stressed the importance of getting staff at all levels involved in patient safety, both through this new program and other means.

"For example, we'd like to have people in the nursing level take the lead in implementing safety initiatives," he said.

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