Editor’s Notebook: Blatant Self-promotion
March / April 2008
Editor’s Notebook
Blatant Self-promotion
I hope readers of the print issues of Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare at least occasionally visit the magazine’s web site, www.psqh.com (where, among other things all articles are archived and freely available, without sign-in or passwords). Further, I encourage everyone who hasn’t already done so to sign up for our free, monthly online newsletter, available at www.psqh.com/http://psqh.com/subscriptions/newsletter.html. The eNewsletter allows us to run news items, product release information, and business notices for which we don’t have room in the print issues. It also gives me a monthly opportunity — in an Editor’s Note — to share worthwhile items I discover, for which there is also not nearly enough space in print.
I will risk boring those of you who do see the eNewsletter and mention two videos I highlighted recently online. In February, I provided a link to a radio show broadcast on Radio Boston, a weekly program produced by NPR station WBUR. The show features host David Boeri with Dr. Lucian Leape, MITSS President Linda Kenney, malpractice attorney Andrew Mayer, and hospital CEO and blogger Paul Levy. It’s well worth an hour of your (or anyone’s) time. Go to www.radioboston.org , click on Show Archive, and scroll down to Medical Apologies (January 31, 2008).
The second video link is also to a Boston organization, Health Care for All (HC4A). In the January eNewsletter, I recommended three videos produced by HC4A’s Consumer Health Quality Council, in which members of the Council tell their “Stories of Harm,” showing how systemic problems can lead to errors that inflict devastating, permanent harm. The videos are well written, straightforward, and beautifully produced. To find them, visit www.hcfama.org, under Advocacy & Policy, choose Quality of Care and then the Stories of Harm link along the left side of the page. On the same page, you’ll find three more “Stories of Harm,” in text versions.
PSQH Travels to Turkey
Shortly after this print issue of PSQH is in the mail, I will travel to Turkey for the 2nd International Patient Safety Congress (www.patientsafetycongress.net), to be held March 26 to 29 in Antalya, a resort town on the Mediterranean. Four others with ties to PSQH — as authors or Advisory Board members — will also attend; all of us will be speaking with, I’m told, simultaneous translation into Turkish and Russian. This promises to be an extraordinary experience — way beyond my familiar environments — on which I intend to report, most likely through postings and perhaps photographs on PSQH.com. I hope to see you there.