Trapping Safety into Rules by Corinne Bieder & Mathilde Bourrier

Author:Corinne Bieder & Mathilde Bourrier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Limited
Published: 2013-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

Procedures under professional control

Because professional performance and control, particularly amongst physicians, relies on professional criteria (peer review; examination; credentialing), procedure-based strategies occurs within professional channels. One example is peer to peer teaching at bedside (that is, a young trainee taught by a senior surgeon in theatre how to perform an appendectomy). These are part of current practice and are not strictly formalized.

Guidelines on the other hand are more formal and have been recently implemented on a large scale in hospitals and other healthcare organizations (Audet 1990, Field 1994). Clinical guidelines can be defined as systematically developed statements to assist practitioner and patient decisions about appropriate healthcare for specific clinical circumstances. There are three different types of guidelines: (1) protocols – strict rules to be followed in detail with little space for variability, (2) consensus guidelines – a set of best practice recommendations developed on an expert-based support, and (3) evidence-based guidelines – a set of recommendation based on a systematic retrieval and appraisal of information from the scientific literature including the rating of the strength of the evidence (McKinlay 2004).

Protocols are the most formalized way of procedure-based strategies and are close to the approach seen in other industries. They are usually used in specialty high-risk areas and for specific procedures such as emergency resuscitation, chemotherapy or where legislation regulates the practice such as forensic psychiatry. Guidelines represent a weaker type of procedure-based strategy and appear more as systematically developed statements to assist clinicians rather than formal steps to guide a diagnostic or treatment process. Guidelines are available from professional organizations and healthcare governmental agencies or can be found in the scientific medical literature.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.