Welcome to your Wellness Advisor! Issue 2.0, By Mike Roizen, M.D., Chief Wellness Officer

In this issue:
- Wellness and patient safety – what’s the connection?
- Last week’s names/suggestions
- Wellness WOW – Bubbles are bad


Wellness and patient safety
How do we make Cleveland Clinic the healthiest place for our employees and the safest place for our patients? It begins with creating a non-blame culture or a “just” culture of safety, the kind of culture Cleveland Clinic leadership is committed to.

What does a “just” culture of safety look like? It’s a culture where you feel free to raise your hand when you make a mistake; where you know that your leaders at all levels honestly support a non-punitive environment; and where you know that you will be valued for coming forward with concerns and errors.

Let’s be honest. Getting through a day in our private or professional lives without making an error is about as likely as winning a 5 million dollar lottery—without ever buying a ticket. Everyone makes mistakes—although it’s been about 12 minutes since I know of one I made!

The key is to learn from our mistakes and to be open about it. This is really important when it comes to mistakes connected with our work. The reason is: if you made an error, the chances are one of your coworkers has probably made the same error. When the same error occurs over and over again, it is called a system problem, which means there is something amiss that causes the same error to occur. System errors are impossible to eliminate if we don’t admit to them and discuss them, without focusing on blame.

Everyone wants to love where they work, and part of loving where you work is being able to improve it. You can only do that in a “just” culture of safety. However, a “just” culture of safety will not excuse: willful disregard for established policy/procedures, repeatedly not reporting errors or hiding or falsifying information about events or near misses.

So when errors occur (or nearly occur), please report and commit to reporting mistakes or near misses so that our systems can be fixed. If you worry punitive measures might occur, just notify Dr. Shannon Phillips, Cleveland Clinic’s Patient Safety Officer.

Last week’s names/suggestions
You submitted more than 600 different names and more than 800 wellness suggestions after reading the first edition of our Wellness newsletter. WOW! Our advisory committee has pared the names down to the dozen they like best and that this Chief loves (I gotta love the name to write the column.) Now, it’s your turn to pick your favorite. Click here to see the list of names and pick your favorite.

Bubbles are bad!
Aside from the stains that coffee and tea may produce on your pearly whites, bubbly soft drinks inflict much more wear and tear on tooth enamel than tea or coffee. In a recent study*, the big surprise was that tooth enamel was damaged by colas and other carbonated beverages, whether they were diet or loaded with sugar. Although all carbonated beverages had some impact on enamel, citrus-flavored sodas hit teeth the hardest. It turns out the culprit is the acids in these beverages. The total acid content and acid type -- look for names like phosphoric, citric, malic, and tartaric -- affect how strong the attack is on your choppers. Rinsing after sipping these bubbly beverages may hasten the acids out of your mouth. Coffee or tea, anyone?

* Dissolution of dental enamel in soft drinks. von Fraunhofer, J. A., Rogers, M. M., General Dentistry 2004 Jul-Aug;52(4):308-312.