Celebrate your safety journey, recharge your safety efforts
Are you a front-line employee thinking about becoming a safety coach or one of our leaders interested in certification as a patient safety champion? Are you interested in taking one of the many patient safety training courses available to our staff? Do you have a helpful patient safety experience to share? Or do you just need to recommit to the S.A.F.E. and T.E.A.M. behaviors after a challenging year?
National Patient Safety Awareness Week is March 14-20. “This is the perfect time to reset our individual patient safety focus and celebrate our collective patient safety successes,” said Steve Mrozowski, director of patient safety for Hershey Medical Center.
As part of Patient Safety’s education efforts, staff will periodically highlight patient safety root-cause analyses and lessons learned in Daily Brief. The article will link to short documents on the department’s Infonet page.
The first article features a short case summary, lessons learned and a challenge question. The team addresses responses during patient surges and high capacity, when employees may be distracted. Checklists, communication tools and use of SAFE bundles are applied in the lessons learned.
In a related effort, St. Joseph Medical Center is working to get more staff members to complete a form that stresses the importance of safety.
The Medical Center achieved an 85% increase in completion of preoperative checklists following a collaborative effort between the nursing and surgical departments.
The checklists offer reminders to staff that they’re following important safety protocols, such as determining when the patient last ate, if they received their medications and if they are infectious.
After discovering many were not consistently completing the forms, Kimberly Scheider, the charge nurse for the post-anesthesia care unit, and Shelley Hickey, the perianesthesia nurse educator, developed an educational program for the nursing staff that stressed the importance of the checklist and provided a hands-on opportunity to put that knowledge into action.
“The information was given to managers, and each nurse received a handout to keep with their badge that included the pertinent details. We also will highlight the education in our orientation process,” said Lori Cross, the perianesthesia nurse manager, adding that the improvement was almost immediate. “Within one month, we saw an 85% increase in compliance – a great example of the collaborative efforts underway to improve quality and safety in our organization.”
Nurses will feature the program in a poster presentation during the April national conference of the American Society of PeriAnesthesia Nurses.
Keep an eye out for this week’s Medical Minute, which will feature Penn State Health patient safety leaders discussing patient safety as the foundation of care and the importance of patient engagement.
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