Becker's Clinical Quality & Infection Control

49 QUALITY IMPROVEMENT & MEASUREMENT talk about the work they're doing. It's really an effort to help everyone see that their work is all connected. Aer these meetings, leaders then bring this message and information back to other team members at their respective regions. Q: I know you became IU Health's vice president of qual- ity, safety and performance improvement in 2017. What advice would you give to a leader who's stepping into a similar role for the first time? MS: I have a couple of friends who are also pediatricians, and we all ended up in similar quality and safety roles within about six months of each other. It was great because we were able to network with each other, and we still talk on a regular basis. My advice would be to find people that do quality and safety work in other places and ask them what they've been doing. I also think it's important for quality and safety leaders to under- stand the current state of their own organization and where people are at before they start launching into their own ideas or solutions. Sometimes, the employees you talk to may have way better ideas than you originally had. Understanding what people are already doing and how you can build on that is really key. Q: What has been your proudest moment as IU Health's vice president of quality and safety? MS: is year, it's been really exciting to see all our regions perform very well in terms of decreasing harm in our hospitals. We focused on reducing healthcare-associated infections for the past two years and have seen our teams come together and do great work to achieve fair- ly aggressive targets. My responsibility was to build on a foundation that was already there. ey took it and ran with it and have done amazing work. We're seeing great results, which gives us the opportu- nity to focus on other areas like mortality and patient experience. Q: If you could fix one patient safety issue overnight, what would it be? MS: What keeps me up at night and gets me out of bed in the morn- ing is the goal of better understanding quality and safety opportuni- ties across the care continuum. If I could fix one thing, it would be to know exactly what's going on in all of our outpatient sites and how we could better help and support those teams. at's really where our patients get the majority of their care — in our primary care offices, emergency departments, infusion centers, etc. We have to get better about focusing on the true continuum of care, rather than just what's going on in our hospitals. n CMS to update hospital validation survey processes By Mackenzie Bean C MS is seeking to simplify the process for validat- ing hospital accreditation surveys, according to an Aug. 22 blog post from The Joint Commission. Historically, state agencies conducted a separate sur- vey within 60 days of an accreditation survey to ensure the accrediting organization performed a thorough evaluation. The new process would eliminate the need for a sec- ond survey, instead allowing the state survey team to observe the accreditation survey in real time. "Although The Joint Commission and the state agen- cies have different processes and methods for conduct- ing a survey, pilot surveys showed the teams arrived at the same conclusion relative to survey findings and overall survey outcome," Mark Pelletier, RN, chief nurs- ing officer and COO of accreditation and certification operations at The Joint Commission, wrote in the post. CMS' pilot program will run through Sept. 30, 2020, and be used to "supplement the existing validation survey process" until the agency can update federal regulations, Mr. Pelletier said. n Depressed residents more likely to make medical errors, study finds By Anuja Vaidya P ediatric resident physicians who tested positive in depression screenings are three times more likely than those who tested negative to commit harmful medical errors, according to a study published in Academic Medicine. Researchers conducted the study at seven pediatric academic medical centers in the United States and Canada from 2011- 13. They screened residents for burnout and depression using the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Human Services Survey and the Harvard Department of Psychiatry/National Depression Screening Day Scale. They used a two-step process, involving surveillance by a research nurse and two physician reviewers, to measure and categorize errors. Of 537 residents, 388 completed the depression screening surveys. Twenty percent screened positive for depression and 46 percent screened positive for burnout. Physicians who screened positive for depression had a three- fold higher rate of harmful errors. However, there was no statistically significant link between de- pression and total or nonharmful errors; or between burnout and harmful, nonharmful, or total errors. n " We have to get better about focusing on the true continuum of care, rather than just what's going on in our hospitals." — Michele Saysana, MD, Vice President of Quality, Safety and Performance Improvement, IU Health

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