SBRT Quality Care

The UCLA Radiosurgery and SBRT Center of Excellence Team

Radiosurgery and SBRT have great potential but must be executed with care, caution and in a highly coordinated teamwork environment.

Important decisions are made regarding these complicated treatments that affect the lives and well being of our patients. These decisions are made in a complex environment that often involves highly sophisticated equipments, rapidly evolving and ambiguous situations; time pressure; severe consequences for error; and performance pressure. The health care field in general has responded to these kinds of issues by becoming specialized.  However, although each professional has extensive skills in his or her own specialization, it is the seamless coordination among those skills that make the quality of the patient's treatment a success.

UCLA Radiation Oncology Radiosurgery and SBRT program operates in a highly organized multidisciplinary teamwork environment. We have assembled a multidisciplinary clinical and research team that has a track record of developing, translating, and utilizing safe and effective methods of treatments. It is commonly recognized that teamwork improves patient care and safety. In fact, one can argue that patient safety depends on it. Well organized sets of rules, regulations and policies may ensure quality patient care for vast majority of our patient; however, it is the teamwork that closes the gap and ensures quality patient care for all our patients.

Some portions of the above presentation are paraphrases from: Salas E et al. Can teamwork enhance patient safety? Forum (July). Cambridge: Harvard Risk Management Foundation. 2003.