Mindlessness In Health Care

Healthcare organizations are facing many challenges as they strive to deliver high-quality care to patients. Healthcare has become complex with increasing regulation demands and increasing cost that make providing quality, safe care, difficult, time-consuming and prone to errors. The goal of healthcare is to provide faster, better and cost effective care while producing better patient outcomes. According to Carr, “Seeking convenience, speed, and efficiency, we rush to off-load work to computers, without reflecting on what we might be sacrificing as a result”. The sacrifice is reducing the human interaction. Reducing human interaction or involvement, leads to reduced skills and a different kind of error. As stated by Skitka, “Rather than necessarily

Strong leadership is essential to execute the changes needed to go from a state of Mindlessness to Mindfulness. Those industries that are high performers are always in a state of “Mindfulness”, Mindfulness looks at those weak signals, responds to those signals in an effort to keep the system working and avoid potential disaster (Weick & Sutcliff, 2007). This state of alertness greatly reduces the chance of automation-induced complacency. There has to be a cultural transformation from the top down. The focus has to go back on doing no harm to the patient. Shifting the mind set to protect the patient instead of the organization is essential for the improvement of quality care and reducing complacency. Staff will have to be focused on what could go wrong, no matter how many times they have performed the task. This way of thinking is going to have to be entrenched into the staff. There has to be processes in place that everyone follows. Therefore, safety measures have to be incorporated into every day practices. Safety measures such as “Situational Awareness”, this process allow you to take the current situation and compare it to what is normal, therefore, reducing the chances of being in a dangerous situation.

One way is to measure compliance is a checklist. Healthcare organizations can immediately standardize care, improve safety, and combat complacency with a simple intervention that requires a piece of paper. That simple piece of paper is a checklist. In healthcare, checklist can help ensure consistency and completeness in carrying out complex task. Checklist can have tremendous effects on preventing harm to patients and decreasing automated complacency. A checklist is standard protocol in the aviation industry. “Although the aircraft checklist has long been regarded as a foundation of pilot standardization and cockpit safety.”( Degani, 2015). Checklist can be used in all areas of the hospital. In healthcare, most errors are caused by omitted steps in defined processes. Omitted steps often lead to adverse advents and patient harm. Those omissions can be greatly reduced by using checklist. Standardizing processes with checklist prioritizes which steps should be done first; also it helps to establish the expectation that every step will be followed every time on every