All About the Baby

The complex systems of medicine and nursing have come together both as amazing successes for patients and their health issues and at same time, a dangerous place to be, if you are in need of medical care. Though both nursing and medicine have always held patient safety as a high and attainable goal, we have been naive in thinking and practicing like we can control outcomes and errors by only using our own human dedication, diligence, education and perserverance. Finally we, like other industries that have significant responsiblities in the area of life and well being, such as the Military, Airlines and Automobile industries are coming around to looking at our hospital enviroments and practices from the stand point of systems and processes that can support or diminish our ability as humans, to give safe, reliable, consistent care, in a most dangerous setting. In order to achieve high reliability and ZERO preventable harm, in a Perinatal setting, we must look closely at the culture of safety, address and put light to issues, behaviors and practices, long held and normalized. We must flatten the herarchial practices and communciation stlyes, and pull from those above mentioned industries that have significantly reduced harm through innovative design, the creation of a culture of safety, and by transforming a team of experts into an expert team. We are many voices and in this complex system but we should have one mission, safe and reliable care. As nurses we are our patients last line of defense and we can be, their most powerful advocate for safe care. The following concepts and solutions will be presented and discussed:

• What causes harm in the perinatal unit, specifically labor and delivery.
• The Perinatal Safety Covenant
• Communication, Human Factors, Innovative Design, and Achieving High Reliabilty
• Transforming your Culture into a Culture of Safety
• Barriers to Change
• Buy in and Spread
• Results

These concepts, practices, attitudes and innovations can be used accross our spectrum of practices.