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Introduction: Handovers are a central process for ensuring information continuity in patient care and, therefore, possess a major influence on patient safety as errors due to poor handovers can lead to life-threatening events. Education to improve handovers and ensure safe patient care can be supported by using critical incident reporting systems (CIRS). The aim of the study is to perform a content analysis of a national CIRS-database with regard to identifying adverse events in handovers situations and to derive competencies for the development of continuing education from these findings.
Methods: A meta model served as a research framework to merge the empirical findings with the London protocol of analysing critical events and the Canadian framework of safety competencies. Relevant cases to be investigated were searched in a freely accessible German CIRS database.
Results: A total of 253 case descriptions were found and analysed. Team factors emerged as the most frequently reported influencing factors following the analysis of the London protocol. Communication errors and missing information as well as a lack of appropriate standards and processes appeared to be the main reasons for critical events to occur. Most of the events happened in units involving surgery and intensive care. A mapping of patient safety competences with the reasons for critical events was conducted in order to determine the practical, concrete and handover related competencies.
Conclusion: Data from a CIRS database and theoretical frameworks can be combined to extract meaningful information about patient safety risks in handover situations. The results are useful for developing curricula to improve handovers based on patient safety competencies.
Objective: The more people there are who use clinical information systems (CIS) beyond their traditional intramural confines, the more promising the benefits are, and the more daunting the risks will be. This review thus explores the areas of ethical debates prompted by CIS conceptualized as smart systems reaching out to patients and citizens. Furthermore, it investigates the ethical competencies and education needed to use these systems appropriately.
Methods: A literature review covering ethics topics in combination with clinical and health information systems, clinical decision support, health information exchange, and various mobile devices and media was performed searching the MEDLINE database for articles from 2016 to 2019 with a focus on 2018 and 2019. A second search combined these keywords with education.
Results: By far, most of the discourses were dominated by privacy, confidentiality, and informed consent issues. Intertwined with confidentiality and clear boundaries, the provider-patient relationship has gained much attention. The opacity of algorithms and the lack of explicability of the results pose a further challenge. The necessity of sociotechnical ethics education was underpinned in many studies including advocating education for providers and patients alike. However, only a few publications expanded on ethical competencies. In the publications found, empirical research designs were employed to capture the stakeholders’ attitudes, but not to evaluate specific implementations.
Conclusion: Despite the broad discourses, ethical values have not yet found their firm place in empirically rigorous health technology evaluation studies. Similarly, sociotechnical ethics competencies obviously need detailed specifications. These two gaps set the stage for further research at the junction of clinical information systems and ethics.