John J. Nance is visiting UT’s Health Science Campus right now, and I’m so glad that he’s here!

Nance is a best-selling author and well-known international advocate of crew resource management and expanded human performance training. He speaks to a wide variety of audiences, including medical professionals, and he is a founding board member of the National Patient Safety Foundation, a not-for-profit organization with a mission, simply put, “to improve the safety of patients.”

Nance’s book, “Why Hospitals Should Fly – The Ultimate Flight Plan to Patient Safety and Quality Care,” outlines the barriers to better practices within hospitals, using analogies to flight as examples.

He spoke to UT physicians and administrators last night, and I was lucky enough to also be a part of the audience.

Nance talked very pointedly about what he sees as a health-care cultural barrier to patient safety – absence of the assumption of human error.

Humans are not perfect. Period.

UTMC has a lot of brilliant, talented humans taking care of patients, but none of them are perfect.

Nance is challenging everyone who delivers health care to actually embrace that fact. He is challenging doctors, nurses, techs and everyone else taking care of a patient to work as a team, not as a group with a commander who isn’t to be questioned and followers who stay silent and follow orders.

This journal feeds both to a Web site for UT faculty, staff and students, and to UTMC’s public Web site, so I have a challenge for all of you…

Regardless of whether you’re a physician, a nurse or a patient receiving care, each of you is part of that health care team. If you have a concern, a question, or something in your gut just doesn’t feel right, you have a responsibility to speak up. As Nance said last night, “If you see it, you own it.”

Even if, in the end, your concern is unfounded, I think a patient would rather it be checked, don’t you?

As the debate wages over what to do about the country’s health-care system, I know that the issue has long been rolling around in the mind of Dr. Jeffrey P. Gold, UT’s provost, executive vice president for health affairs, and dean of the college of medicine.

I’ve heard him eloquently discuss it on a number of occasions, and now his thoughts are out there in an Op-Ed piece he wrote for The Blade.

“You don’t have to read the pages of the newspaper every day to realize that northwest Ohio, Michigan, and the country are going through one of the toughest economic periods of our lifetimes. Because of that, some have suggested that President Obama focus solely on the economy and save the job of overhauling our nation’s health-care system for another day.

“I’d like to point out, as the President did during his June 15 address at the annual meeting of the American Medical Association, that the two issues are inextricably linked. No health care reform – no economic recovery,” he writes.

Read entire article.

So what are your thoughts? Especially about Dr. Gold’s last point – that each of us can do our part by taking better care of ourselves and our families.

What are you doing to take care of yourself, and, by extension, helping with the health-care crisis?

The University of Toledo’s new Heart and Vascular Center began seeing patients in March, but the official event opening the facility was held on May 21. You can watch remarks made by UT leaders.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1i9Mwqu1tY

The UT Heart and Vascular Center is the community’s first integrated center for patient care, education and translational research in cardiac and vascular diseases.

So what does that mean, really?

It means that the center brings together multiple specialties, including cardiology, vascular medicine, vascular surgery, cardiac surgery and cardiac rehabilitation. It also means that researchers are in the office next door, instead of across campus. The cardiologist and the vascular surgeon are across the hall from each other, not across town.

And I’m not talking about your run-of-the-mill specialists or researchers. I’m talking about the only ones in the area who offer expert care in curing atrial fibrillation (the most common form of abnormal heart rhythm), treating syncope (loss of consciousness and posture) and repairing the most traumatic of vascular injuries. I’m talking about researchers who have been awarded $25 million research grants by the National Institutes of Health to determine the best treatment for patients who have high blood pressure and blockage of the renal artery that supplies blood to the kidney.

So congrats to our cardiologists, vasucular surgeons and the health-care professionals who work with them. They now have a home that reflects their “university-quality” expertise!