Eyeglasses—Low-Hanging Fruit?
At the AAMI/FDA Summit on Interoperability, a presenter mentioned a circumstance where a nurse was not able to read a smart pump display because she wasn’t wearing her glasses. I have heard similar comments in the past—always as a sidebar to a main point being made about electronic health records, medical devices, or some other information printed or displayed in a clinical environment—which leads me to wonder how often clinicians put patients at risk because their vision is faulty and uncorrected.
To whatever degree this is a problem, it seems like “low-hanging fruit,” a problem that is easy to identify and fix. Of course, picking low-hanging fruit may turn out to be far more complicated than it seemed at first, and getting people to wear glasses often involves personal issues of self image as well as time to grow accustomed to having something sitting on the bridge of your nose.
If this is, however, a common problem, why are we not talking about it the same way we talk about illegible handwriting? Is this a real problem or are the comments I’ve heard shorthand or a light-hearted way to refer to human factors problems with the devices themselves? It certainly may be true that the size and legibility of type displayed on monitors and screens are inadequate, whether people are wearing their glasses or not, but it is reluctance to wear glasses that people talk about.
As shocking as it seems that clinicians would endanger patients in this way, I am often surprised in other settings by how many people put up with compromised vision because they don’t want to wear glasses. Does anyone else think impaired vision is an issue in patient safety? If so, let’s add wearing glasses to the list of things for which everyone should be accountable: handwashing, adequate rest, and vision correction as needed to perform safely and effectively.