Becker's Clinical Quality & Infection Control

12 PATIENT SAFETY & OUTCOMES 5 health systems' biggest patient safety win this year By Cailey Gleeson F rom creating safety culture tools to collaborating with other systems, hospitals and health systems are consistently working to improve patient safety. Becker's asked five clinical leaders what their biggest patient safety win has been in 2022. Editor's note: Responses were lightly edited for clarity and length. David Williams, MD. Senior Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer at UnityPoint Health (Des Moines, Iowa): At UnityPoint Health we're accelerating our management system, including advancements in team huddles, to improve two-way communication between team members and leaders and be more proactive in preventing patient safety issues across our enterprise. Our new tiered RESPECT Huddles brought immediate improvements to how quickly we're communicating and closing the loop about safety risks and other information critical to operational and clinical needs. Important issues, ideas and wins from direct patient care providers are elevated through the huddle system to our system executive team for response every morning. at means a nurse can have a concern heard by our system CEO on the very day it's raised. ese huddles have empowered our teams to speak up and be the experts in their day-to-day work, which has, in turn, led to higher engagement, increased morale and connection to the meaningfulness of their work. All things that ultimately ensure we're providing the highest quality care to our communities. Hilary Babcock, MD. Vice President and Chief Quality Officer at BJC HealthCare (St. Louis): BJC HealthCare is guided by our BJC Crest Values of Compassion - Respect - Excellence - Safety - Teamwork. To support our value of safety and to fulfill our commitment to keeping patients, families, our communities and each other safe, we worked with an outside vendor to develop a validated safety culture survey tool. Development of this survey tool also supports our strategic goal of becoming a high-reliability system. Healthcare organizations have been challenged over the past few years with managing the influx of patients due to the COVID-19 pandemic, working through staffing challenges, and addressing the issue of increased violence against healthcare workers. We therefore recognized the importance of assessing our safety culture, but also understood that we needed to do so in a way that did not further burden our health system or staff and that also allowed us to obtain feedback that we could act on quickly. us, our focus in developing a safety culture survey was to keep the tool brief, reliable and actionable. We were successful in this endeavor through the development of a validated 14-question safety culture survey, which focused on psychological safety, teamwork, continuous improvement, and both patient and employee safety. e safety culture survey was administered fall 2021, with a good response rate. e results revealed that our biggest strength is teamwork and that we have opportunities with our safe-to-speak-up culture. Several action items were implemented, including guidance to front-line leaders about specific actions they should take to Chicago safety net hospital under scrutiny for neglect, deaths By Mariah Taylor C hicago-based Roseland Community Hospital is under scrutiny after multiple federal inspection reports, medical malpractice lawsuits and a whistleblower complaint to the state highlighted neglect and errors resulting in patient deaths, ProPublica reported Oct. 12. Since January 2020, errors or neglect have contributed to the death of 13 patients, according to ProPublica. Four of the deaths have resulted in lawsuits, and two were reported in a whistleblower complaint filed by a former Roseland physician, an investigation by ProPublica and PBS affiliate WTTW News found. Federal regulators have cited Roseland at least 72 times since Jan. 1, 2017, and issued eight immediate jeopardy citations, ProPublica reported. Immediate jeopardy citations flag problems that, if left uncorrected, put a patient at risk of harm or death. Roseland has been cited more than any other Illinois hospital monitored by CMS, according to ProPublica. The safety net hospital has been at risk of shutting down, but leaders at the nonprofit facility defend it. Timony Egan, Roseland's president and CEO, declined an interview. Spokesperson Dennis Culloton and hospital's new chief quality officer, Sharon DeVita, emphasized that since 2021 Roseland has examined and enhanced safety practices across the facility. They have addressed the specific deficiencies cited by regulators, they told ProPublica. A spokesperson for the state public health department confirmed corrective action was taken in the wake of the 2021 immediate jeopardy warnings and was "sufficient." Roseland now is in good standing with the state. But some are concerned the problems will continue. "Not sure there's anyone looking at these hospitals holistically," Lisa McGiffert, a co-founder of the Patient Safety Action Network, said of hospitals in general. "[Regulators] will say, 'We found infection control breaches in a particular room. … You have to clean up the sinks.' But if there's a more systemic problem, just cleaning up the sink isn't going to fix the issue." n

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