Weekly Newsletter: Don Berwick on Stopping the Bullet, the Failed Invention of Handwashing, and a New Blog Post

Gorge Sanchez, 20, is struggling to leave behind a life of crime and violence in Holyoke, MA, USA. But our systems invest more in incarceration and emergency medical care than they do in preventing gun violence, injury, and illness to begin with. In the closing keynote address of the 26th IHI National Forum, Don Berwick, MD, called on health care providers to stop the bullet speeding toward Gorge Sanchez by broadening the scope of health improvement. “We literally wait for Gorge to lie in a pool of blood before we help him,” Berwick said. You can watch Berwick’s poignant address here.

What can you do as a student? Apply for the IHI Open School's newest course, Leadership and Organizing for Population Health, and take part in a movement to improve health in your own community. We've extended the deadline; applications are now due on Friday, January 30.

Surgeon Atul Gawande writes in a new book, Being Mortal, that medicine has failed to serve people’s wishes at the end of their lives. Across the US, community groups are changing that by creating opportunities for people to articulate their end-of-life wishes and making sure their preferences are respected. WIHI, IHI’s bi-weekly audio program, will explore this topic on air tomorrow, January 15, at 2 PM EST. You can learn to have talks with patients about end-of-life decisions in the IHI Open School course PFC 103: Having the Conversation: Basic Skills for Conversations about End-of-Life Care.

In 1846, doctors were becoming more interested in anatomy and data, but they still didn’t know about germs. Enter Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician at the General Hospital in Vienna, who noticed that women in one maternity ward were dying from puerperal fever at a higher rate than in another. He began testing ideas for improvement and soon landed on a promising idea: Doctors were contaminating women after performing autopsies. He mandated that physicians wash their hands with chlorine, and the death rate fell. However, even with these promising results, the change didn’t spread. Why did people resist the change? What can we learn today from the experience? Read the rest of the story on NPR’s Shots blog.

On Thursday, January 22, 12 PM EST the IHI Open School will hold its quarterly Global Chapter Call. Join our Northeast Regional Leaders, Ross and Valerie, and our Continental Europe Regional Leader, Jo-Inge, as they discuss the importance of transition planning and tips for maintaining a strong Chapter from year to year. Learn from Chapter Leaders’ past struggles in these areas and how they’ve built smoother processes. Click here for connection information.

The Global Chapter calls are open to everyone — Chapters Leaders, Open School Chapter members, and Faculty Advisors. To ensure everyone in our network has the opportunity to join this and other activities, please take a moment to update your Chapter contact information.

IHI Open School Chapters, are you interested in offering quality improvement training on your campus? The Emory University Chapter did just that. Ariadne DeSimone, and MD/MPH candidate, explains in a new blog post how she pitched the idea and executed the training with her team. “All 50 participants wanted to participate in a second training day in the spring,” she writes. “This was great news, and it represented a big win, but we certainly have our work cut out for us!”

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