Why Did it Happen?
Many hospitals are struggling to stay afloat. When one is fighting to survive, one forgets the real mission of the hospital. Core values take the back seat and/or are missing.
What Are the Root Causes?
Our business schools must stop teaching MBA students the notion that “all is fair in love, war, and business.” Business leaders and CEOs must understand that they have an obligation to the community that provides them with the infrastructure, services, and other resources to conduct their businesses. A CE, who is usually the department head, is bogged down with the daily tasks of managing the department, working with budgets, operations reports, meetings, and employees’ needs and demands. He or she does not have the time and resources to attend to the RCAs and technology/systems-related prospective and retrospective assessments. Therefore, in order to survive, many CEs manage to carve out their scope of responsibility to only repairable medical devices (mostly electronic devices) because the technicians in the department came from an electronics technician educational program or the ranks of electronic technicians.
What Can One Do About It?
Identify a need to reevaluate the core curriculum of MBAs. Teach them that the community provides a certain infrastructure, services, and other resources to allow them to conduct business in the community, and they have certain obligations to the community and the patients they serve. Core curricula of BMETs and CEs need to be reevaluated also. Teach and share with them the different kinds of failures/incidents/injuries that can occur in hospitals. Include not only the repairable medical devices arena, but also problems with the application of these devices, processes that have failed with nonrepairable devices, and the systems failures that have occurred so far. Teach them how to conduct root cause analysis and some of the successful forcing functions and other robust, fault-tolerant solutions that have been implemented to solve these problems. If the expectation is to have these people get involved in improving patient safety, consider some of the unsolved problems and how to conduct HFMEA™ to look at solutions and use new technologies and new processes to solve these problems. The CE’s job functions must meet the mission statement of his or her department.