In the summer of 2013 I was lucky enough to be referred to the Department of Public Health for a paid internship. The experience was pretty awesome, and I was happy to see Health Policy in action at a government level in the US.
Through my work at DPH I started working a little bit on Serious Reportable Events which are basically "adverse events" which are considered to be "never events". They are called never events because they are supposed to happen NEVER. Some examples of SREs are falls, pressure sores, wrong site surgeries, wrong surgeries and all sorts of pretty bad things that we would never think happens in hospitals.
By law hospitals have to report these never events to DPH. Each adverse event is logged by a hospital staff person on a form, which includes the person's name, address, DOB, illness they were admitted with, ethnic origin, race, language, what time the event occurred, what kind of harm the event caused the patient, and all sorts of other information.
DPH enters the data into a program, and then compiles the data into excel sheets. These excel sheets only list the name of the hospital and the number of each SRE they reported in a particular year. This information is then released to the public on the DPH website.
The data has a geographic aspect to it in that hospitals can be located on a state map, and a time factor to them because the data is presented in annual sheets. The data is also broken out by acute and non acute hospitals.
Prof. Offenhuber helped me zone in on this already available data which means I don't have to wait for someone to release data to me. The data is simple, which will allow me to focus on learning the intricacies of various programs.
I am back to being excited!
Through my work at DPH I started working a little bit on Serious Reportable Events which are basically "adverse events" which are considered to be "never events". They are called never events because they are supposed to happen NEVER. Some examples of SREs are falls, pressure sores, wrong site surgeries, wrong surgeries and all sorts of pretty bad things that we would never think happens in hospitals.
By law hospitals have to report these never events to DPH. Each adverse event is logged by a hospital staff person on a form, which includes the person's name, address, DOB, illness they were admitted with, ethnic origin, race, language, what time the event occurred, what kind of harm the event caused the patient, and all sorts of other information.
DPH enters the data into a program, and then compiles the data into excel sheets. These excel sheets only list the name of the hospital and the number of each SRE they reported in a particular year. This information is then released to the public on the DPH website.
The data has a geographic aspect to it in that hospitals can be located on a state map, and a time factor to them because the data is presented in annual sheets. The data is also broken out by acute and non acute hospitals.
Prof. Offenhuber helped me zone in on this already available data which means I don't have to wait for someone to release data to me. The data is simple, which will allow me to focus on learning the intricacies of various programs.
I am back to being excited!
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