Patient Safety Quiz Question #5

Q: What's the best thing you can do to stay healthy?
A. Watch what you eat
B. Exercise
C. Be an active member of your own health care team
D. Go to the doctor

A. C. While all of these options can lead to better health, being an active member of your own health care team is an essential part of staying healthy. It's important to take steps to learn more and ask questions about your health.

(Source: http://www.ahrq.gov/consumer/quicktips/tipsurgery.htm, Quick Tips When Planning for Surgery).

Here at UPS Healthy Connections – Informed Choices, we continually stress the importance of UPSers making informed decisions about their health care. While it can be difficult to make these kinds of decisions, we strive to provide you with tools and resources that focus on quality and raising awareness of important health related issues.

Quality, Safety Tools and Information in Online Provider Directory

A good time to think about the quality and safety of your health care is before you receive it.

The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), for example, powers a site called SpeakUp, which provides consumers with patient safety tips. Seven different brochures are available on the SpeakUp website, which address safety issues such as wrong site surgery, organ donation and infection control, all in an effort to get patients involved in their health care. These materials are also available in Spanish.

Other good resources are the following organizations:

• The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ): This public website provides information on a multitude of health-related topics, including several patient safety tip sheets and other documents.
• The Commission on Cancer (CoC): The CoC offers information on facilities approved through their review process. Aetna is the only health plan working with the CoC to provide members with links to search for hospitals.
• The FDA: We also added a link from Docfind to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), which has developed educational materials on medication safety, already available on our Aetna Pharmacy Management website.