Joshua’s Story shares the harm caused when we fail to document healthcare and don’t provide frontline healthcare workers with the modern decision support tools that they need to efficiently do their work, receive timely notification of the deteriorating health of Patients and ensure they are capable of learning from mistakes they make so that the reasons can be understood and they’re never repeated.
The Learning Clinic’s VitaPac is my favourite example of a mHealth company that is doing great things in this area (eg. their VitalPAC app is today helping more than 15,000 NHS nurses record more 10 million sets of Patient Observations per year) and it surprises me that Patient Care Quality Campaign and Pressure Groups aren’t doing more to champion the Hospitals that are adopting such modern systems:
If you attend a Hospital that’s still not adequately supporting their staff to properly do the job and still relying on error prone paper charts please feel encouraged to share this URL TheLearningClinic.co.uk with the CEO along with your thoughts about why it would improve your confidence in the quality of the care that they’re providing.
Note: I would’ve liked to have embedded the above video but for some reason the PatientStories website has T&C’s from the 1990’s regarding the use of their content eg. the videos can’t be played at full screen, embedded/shared and must not be used within formal education (whatever that means).
Update 21 October: Thanks to Murray Anderson-Wallace, Executive Producer, Patient Stories I’ve been able to replace the image above with an embed of the video (see comments).
Thanks for picking up this angle of “Joshua’s Story” – It’s a really valid point. The reliance on written records and memory for such importance vital signs monitoring (and escalation) is archaic, especially when several excellent systems (Patient Track is the one I know best) exist.
As Exec Producer of the http://www.patientstories.org.uk site I also wanted to respond to your comments about our t&c’s. All our films are independently funded, which means licensing revenues for use by educational institutions and organisations are the only direct source to research & produce the films, and run the website.
Anyone can watch the films on-line at no cost and for a relatively small payment, they can be licensed for work in small groups or for use if “formal” educational / learning programmes.
Unfortunately, we have found is that a number of (multi-million pound) healthcare organisations and commercial training companies decide that copyright law doesn’t apply to them and they go ahead anyway.
Personally, I’d prefer it if we could make all this work freely available on-line (without all the work we have to put into licensing etc) – If you have an alternative business model, then I’d be delighted to hear it.
Also, there is nothing to stop you emailing me directly and I’d happily have provided you with some embed code. In fact, I still will :-)
Murray Anderson-Wallace
Hi Murray,
Thanks for your comments.
It’s rare to see such high quality story telling skills so I would be delighted to take the opportunity to meet up with you next time I’m in the UK to share some ideas I have about possible ways you could leverage other distribution channels (like YouTube) and syndicated partners with their own websites to further share your quality video content and at the same time generate funds to continue your good work.
My point about formal educational/learning programmes relates to how I see there no longer being a distinction eg. lots of medics use the content in this ‘informal’ blog as part of their ‘formal’ educational/learning programmes, for formal training on things like social media we’re much better off looking to Patients than Medical Educators, etc
So perhaps you don’t want to provide me with an embed code after all ;)
Thanks. My interest is in making high quality films that have real impact – the easier the business side is the better!
I get frustrated that large institutions who should be supporting this work can’t even get together a small sum to improve the quality of what they provide.
Really interesting comment on the way medical eduction works. I am talking about this early next month at the http://www.aspih.org.uk, so will refer to this conversation then!
Very happy to provide you with the code if you let me know a good email address and I’ll authorise the embed on your site.
“I get frustrated that large institutions who should be supporting this work can’t even get together a small sum to improve the quality of what they provide”
Jonathan Marks is a great inspiration to me and sharing the arguments he has made for storytelling can be incredibly effective when you are trying to help such large institutions reach their goals in a world where the barrier to entry is so low that every company can be a media company eg. audiences only remember the message from great storytellers, building a powerful narrative is an essential strategy for any team who wants to change the world.
The ASPiH event looks very interesting. Check out some of the articles I’ve posted on the use of mHealth tools at Medical Schools like Stanford & their Venture Lab, UCIrvine, Leeds and the Welsh Deanary and don’t hesitate to let me know if you’d like an introduction to my friend Robert Cairnduff, COO at 3D4Medical – a company that is behind most of the key rich multimedia content used at the world’s best medical schools.
PS I’m very easy to reach via a comment on this blog (just mark it “PRIVATE” if you don’t want it published) or email (mail AT 3gdoctor DOT com).