Sharing the pain, striving for gain

Sharing the pain.

I t finally happened. I finally had a chart audit that inspired me to tell others about it. Most clinicians are accustomed to having their outpatient charts reviewed by a variety of representatives from managed care organizations, hospitals, and peer review organizations. When the medical records of patients with diabetes are reviewed, most surveys focus on several key quality measures. These u...

Gain without Pain

1.17 The drudgery of weeding is so ingrained into the lives of farmers in developing countries that weeds are taken for granted and often overlooked in pest surveys. And yet weeding by hand, typically carried out by women and children, accounts for 50% of the total labour inputs needed to produce a crop, deprives millions of children the joys of playtime – and often schooling – and adds to the ...

Striving for correctness

ion layers, conceptually illustrated in Table 1. The security engineer must understand that the device designer, circuit designer, and operating system architect have different viewpoints. Each specialist assumes that the interface provided to him or her by the underlying layer is primitive and trustworthy. This trust is a consequence of specialization. Engineers working at one technological le...

No pain - all gain: Advocating for improved paediatric pain management.

Striving for Perfection

Among the powerful barriers to making progress in patient safety is an attitude of complacency induced by the rarity of serious events and the general human bias toward assuming that things will work as they are supposed to. Although the overall incidence figures for accidental injuries and deaths in healthcare are horrendous—more than 1 million preventable injuries and 44 000–98 000 preventabl...