Patient Safety Movement Foundation (PSMF) Mid Year Meeting

Patient Safety

PSMF brings together healthcare professionals, patient advocates and industry in a common and ambitious fight to reach zero preventable deaths by 2020.

A study, published in the British Medical Journal in 2016, by researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine says medical errors should rank as the third leading cause of death in the United States — and highlights how shortcomings in tracking vital statistics may hinder research and keep the problem out of the public eye.

The authors, led by Johns Hopkins surgeon Dr. Martin Makary, call for changes in death certificates to better tabulate fatal lapses in care. In an open letter, they urge the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to immediately add medical errors to its annual list reporting the top causes of death.

Based on an analysis of prior research, the Johns Hopkins study estimates that more than 250,000 Americans die each year from medical errors. On the CDC’s official list, that would rank just behind heart disease and cancer, which each took about 600,000 lives in 2014 and in front of respiratory disease, which caused about 150,000 deaths.

Stephen Thorpe, Chairman of NGPod Global, made the pledge to share data with the PSMF on behalf of NGPod Global and attends the PSMF meetings to learn, share and contribute to the organisations efforts to make a difference.

NGPod Global have been participating in discussions with Children’s Hospital Colorado (CHC) to communicate the excellent work they’ve done in establishing guidelines and training after the death of Deahna Visscher’s son Grant. Deahna, now volunteering as a Patient Safety Advocate at the hospital and also on the American Society of Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition (ASPEN) sub-committee NOVEL (seeking New Opportunities for Verification of Enteral tube Location), and Clinical Nurse Specialist Christine Peyton from CHC attended the mid year and presented Grant’s story and the actions taken at CHC after Grant’s death.

Delegates unanimously agreed to the adoption of nasogastric tube misplacement  as one of the APSS’s to be formulated and presented at the next annual meeting to be held next February in London, England, by invitation of the Rt. Hon. Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Health who attend the last PSMF annual congress in Dana Point, California where he, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden where keynote speakers.

NGPod Global look forward to continuing to contribute to discussions at NOVEL, CHC and PSMF in the pursuit of setting out best practice guidelines to form the basis of a PSMF APSS which other PSMF pledged organisations will adopt.