Tip of the week by Cassie Moore, ACNM writer and editor
Sometimes the answers to our big problems are so small and easy,
they seem like they couldn’t possibly be the right solutions. If
you haven’t already, take a look at this interesting article
from The New York Times , The Simplest Health Solutions? It’s
Complicated , in which author Abigail Zuger, MD, talks about how
the simplest things—like soap!—have made a huge difference in
terms of public health. When the ACNM staff recently sat down
for a screening of “Birth of a Surgeon ,” a PBS documentary
following midwives-in-training in Mozambique, it was evident
that just a few simple little things—a generator that ran long
enough to provide light for operations, a supply of basics like
rubber gloves—would be a tremendous help to clinicians (and moms
and babies) there. So what’s the next big little thing? A
checklist. Believe it or not, an ordered list of actions that
must be done during a medical procedure actually makes a big
difference in patient safety. Zu