The ‘100,000 Lives Campaign’ has significantly reduced morbidity and mortality in the American health care system as quality came to play a pivotal role. As its title suggests, the initiative is aimed at saving 100,000 lives every year by adopting proven best practices in hospitals across the entire spectrum of services and the results have been impressive.
T.S. Ravi Kumar, president of All India Institute of Medical Sciences at Mangalagiri (AIIMS-M) in Guntur district, has conceived a similar strategy for India to save 300,000 lives every year keeping in view the need to mitigate the phenomenal disease burden imposed by the lack of access to quality medical care.
As one of a 10-member committee, which drafted the World Health Organisation (WHO)’s Global Patient Safety Interprofessional Curriculum Guide, Dr. Ravi Kumar reported to the Director-General of Health Services (DGHS), which nominated him to be a part of the WHO exercise, that a set of ‘never events’ have to be followed in hospitals so that morbidity and deaths can be reduced.
‘Never events’
Some ‘never events’ might look trivial, like preventing a patient from slipping and falling at hospitals, but they are important for sending back the disease-stricken people home hale and heartly. Then there are far more serious and dangerous ‘never events’ like the ‘retention of foreign objects’ in operated patients, according to him.
“These are all preventable harms, which the patient safety cell of DGHS has taken note of. It is fine-tuning the National Patient Safety Framework for achieving the desired outcome. A delegation of the WHO will be coming to India soon for taking the joint initiative forward,” Dr. Ravi Kumar said in an exclusive interview to The Hindu . Dr. Ravi Kumar observed that there were mistakes in nursing care, mismatched blood transfusions, deaths of low-risk mothers etc. which could be prevented. Besides, there were ‘near misses’ of unplanned events which could have fatal consequences for the patients, Dr. Kumar said, recalling the anxious moments he had been through while assisting Ellison C. Pierce who is considered a pioneer in reducing anaesthesia-related fatalities, in the performance of a liver surgery at the Harvard University when something went wrong but the patient was saved.
As far as the quality of health care at AIIMS-M is concerned, Dr. Ravi Kumar said he formed a patient safety group there for adopting best practices before the likely launch of in-patient services by the end of 2020. He was roping in some of the world’s best medical institutions like Mount Sinai and UT Southwestern Medical Centres and has already tied up academic and research collaboration with the IIT-Madras.
