Overview of Project Consultation

Everyone Is Responsible (for Patient Safety)

The webmaster has always been encouraged and supported by Superintendant Kuo to provide advice and training to other hospitals. This includes hospitals affiliated with the main Changhua Nanguo campus (Changhua league hospitals) for varying degrees of management assistance but with a unified hospital information system throughout the league, other hospitals in Taiwan but not affiliated (they have their own management, independant hospital board, and their own information systems).

Over the past five years, this has included hospitals outside of Taiwan. Superintendant Kuo is very busy visiting, lecturing, and consulting in south-east Asian countries (eg mainland China, Vietnam, Mongolia etc) and inspires many of these overseas hospitals to send study groups to our hospital for short courses on hospital management, healthcare quality, and patient safety.

Since 2004, all of the planning, development, and implementation of Quality and Safety for league hospitals has been run by the IPB, physically located in the main Nanguo campus, but based on a virtual consulting model using the internet (this website). Since 2008, this consultation service was extended to non-league hospitals, and in late 2011, to hospitals in mainland China.

The [Project List] is a list of all projects that I am advising on. It also lists all hospitals participating, and the stage they are at in achieving a goal of excellence. This table is provided as a dashboard for those hospitals to compare themselves with an approximate peer group, hence it is not available to non-participants. Staff of participating hospitals must login to be able to view the associated webpages.

The list of projects in the accompanying table Project List, therefore, do not represent whether or not hospitals are working in that area (many projects are required for hospital accreditation). The table is a merely a reminder to Lunge himself as to which projects he has personally advised on. The staging is completely subjective, and decided upon by LunGe where the goal of excellence is safe, efficient, cost-effective, high-quality, patient-centered healthcare.

A key concept is that everyone in the hospital who has access to the patient or patient information has a responsibility to ensure the patient's safety: [everyone is responsible]; for example, if the clinical laboratory discovers that a biochemistry measurement is a critical, life-threatening value, it is not enough to only send an email or beeper message into cyberspace. The laboratory should follow the progress of that piece of information until they confirm that the patient's therapy was adjusted in response to that data, and continue to follow until the patient's repeat levels return to within normal limits, or more invasive, appropriate therapy is instituted. An alternative of [everyone is responsible] is "what if the patient is your mother? Would you be satisfied with ... (the laboratory just sending the message into cyberspace)?"

Projects are tailored to reflect a hospital's resources. No one model fits all, and district hospitals will not be expected to perform the same as medical centers, although all will be encouraged to meet our goals of excellence. For a new member of the program, considerable time will be spent understanding the information systems available, the ability of the onsite programmers, whether computing requirements are outsourced, and other constraints. Basically, we will be looking for projects that can be accomplished without further expenditure, relying on early successes to create interest in later, more resource-intensive projects.

How The Program Works