Paul Barach

Julie K. Johnson

Juan A. Sanchez

Jeffrey P. Jacobs

This book focuses exclusively on the surgical patient and on the perioperative environment with its unique socio-technical and cultural issues. It covers preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative processes and decision making and explores both sharp-end and latent factors contributing to harm and poor quality outcomes. It is intended to be a resource for all healthcare practitioners that interact with the surgical patient. This book provides a framework for understanding and addressing many of the organizational, technical, and cultural aspects of care to one of the most vulnerable patients in the system, the surgical patient. The first section presents foundational principles of safety science and related social science. The second exposes barriers to achieving optimal surgical outcomes and details the various errors and events that occur in the perioperative environment. The third section contains prescriptive and proactive tools and ways to eliminate errors and harm. The final section focuses on developing continuous quality improvement programs with an emphasis on safety and reliability. Surgical Patient Care: Improving Safety, Quality and Value targets an international audience which includes all hospital, ambulatory and clinic-based operating room personnel as well as healthcare administrators and managers, directors of risk management and patient safety, health services researchers, and individuals in higher education in the health professions. It is intended to provide both fundamental knowledge and practical information for those at the front line of patient care. The increasing interest in patient safety worldwide makes this a timely global topic. As such, the content is written for an international audience and contains materials from leading international authors who have implemented many successful programs.

Improving Safety, Quality and Value

Surgical Patient Care

Age twenty-eight and fed up with the office job he settled for, Paul Barach decided to travel to Japan to follow a vision he had in college: to walk the ancient 750-mile Shikoku pilgrimage trail. Here are some things he did not decide to do: learn Japanese, do any research, road test his hiking shoes, or check if it's the hottest summer in history. And he went anyway, hoping to change his life. Fighting Monks and Burning Mountains is the absurd and dramatic journey of one impulsive American's search for answers on a holy path in an exotic land. Along the pathway connecting 88 Buddhist temples, he'll face arduous mountain climbs, hide from guards in a toilet stall, challenge a priest to a mountaintop karate battle, and other misadventures. He'll also delve into the fascinating legends of this ancient land, including a dragon-fighting holy man, a berserker warrior-priest, haunted temples, and a vendetta-driven ghost that overthrew a dynasty. Told with humor and humility, Fighting Monks and Burning Mountains is a funny, engaging memoir about the consequences of impulsive decisions, and the things you can discover while you're looking for something else. Also that boars are terrifying in person.

Paul Barach

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