- Apr 2022
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In her 2002 dissertation, and then in a series of articles published in medicaljournals, Pape made a case for imitating this practice. “The key to preventingmedication errors lies with adopting protocols from other safety-focusedindustries,” Pape wrote in the journal MEDSURG Nursing in 2003. “The airlineindustry, for example, has methods in place that improve pilots’ focus andprovide a milieu of safety when human life is at stake.”
In a 2002 dissertation and subsequent articles, Tess Pape proposed imitating solutions proposed by the FAA in airline accidents as a means of limiting distractions during medicine dispensing by nurses and medical staff to limit preventable medical errors.
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the Institute of Medicine had released a landmark report on patientsafety, To Err Is Human. The report found that as many as 98,000 Americanswere dying each year as a result of preventable medical errors occurring inhospitals—more people than succumbed to car accidents, workplace injuries, orbreast cancer. And some significant portion of these deaths involved mistakes inthe dispensing of drugs.
Some might see the 98,000 preventable medical error deaths reported by the Institute of Medicine in To Err is Human (1999) now and laugh at the farcical number of deaths due to coronavirus since 2020, a large proportion of which could have been prevented due to better communication and coordination?
What if a more pragmatic anthropological viewpoint could be given to the current fractured state of American politics? If anthropologists are taught not to make value judgements on the way other cultures have come to live their lives, but simply to appreciate and report on them accurately, then perhaps we should leave those on the far right who believe in top down, patriarchal rule to their devices?
What if we nudged (forced) them all to actually live by their own rules by enforcing them to the nth degree? Republican politicians can only get away with badmouthing abortion or homophobic viewpoints because their feet are not held to the fire when those issues impinge upon their own families or even themselves. They have the wealth and the power to flout the laws and not face the direct consequences personally. Would their tunes change if forced by their own top down patriarchal perspectives applying to them?
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