This post has been shared by the AdvoConnection Blog. It was written with a patient-client audience in mind, but might be useful to you, too.
It is provided so you can find it in a search here at myAPHA.org, but you’ll need to link to the original post to read it in its entirety.
Link to the original full length post.
The Surgical Assembly Line
When I think of an assembly line, two images pop into my head: The I Love Lucy Chocolate Factory episode where Lucy and Ethel are trying to wrap chocolates (and eat them too!) and can’t possibly keep up. My high school history class, when we learned about Henry Ford’s invention of the concept of an assembly line, where hundreds of cars were being assembled in one day. It revolutionized manufacturing, helping companies produce much more than ever before. I thought of both when I read about this surgeon, Brett Greenky, and his assembly line of hip and knee replacement surgeries – 14 in a day, and 3 at one time – and the $2 million malpractice suit he lost because he ruined a patient’s quality of life. Mistakes were made. He couldn’t keep up. Assembly line surgeries have been going on for years, ever since surgeons – and the hospitals and day surgery centers they operate in – followed the money: the more surgeries, the more income. The shorter the wait for a patient, the better chance they would choose to have surgery. And of course, it’s a lot less expensive for one surgeon with one paycheck to do more surgeries, than it is to hire more surgeons and have to pay more paychecks. In fact, “assembly line surgery” or “production line surgery” isn’t a new concept, nor is it a bad idea. In particular, academic medical centers, where student surgeons are learning their trade and honing their skills, have operated in assembly-line-surgical fashion for years. They are very efficient, of course. There are even awards for surgical efficiency when built as production lines. Further, if you think about it, “division of labor,” making sure that the person most skilled with one aspect of a surgery performs that one aspect, while another professional more skilled at another part of the surgery is performing that aspect, can be highly beneficial to a patient, improving quality. The problems crop up when efficiency becomes more important than effectiveness and quality; when the almighty dollar becomes more important than the patient’s outcomes. It turns out that Brett Greenky operated for 14 hours that day he messed up his patient’s hip replacement. No matter how skilled a surgeon he was, he must have been too tired to do a good job. When personnel are tired, it’s not just a problem with the mechanics of the…