Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/824946
12 PATIENT SAFETY Rebooting Patient Safety: 7 Questions With the Leaders of IHI and NPSF By Brian Zimmerman T he National Patient Safety Foundation and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement announced in March plans to merge, effective May 1. e move combines the safety programs of each organization, creating a robust institution focused on accelerat- ing advances and improvements in the field of healthcare quality and safety. e leaders of both IHI and NPSF stayed on with the combined entity aer the merger. Derek Feeley, CEO of IHI, retains his title and oversees the new or- ganization. Mr. Feeley served as IHI's executive vice president from 2013 to 2015 before taking the reins as CEO. Prior to joining IHI, Mr. Feeley worked in the Scottish government as director general for health and social care and CEO of the National Health Service, where he advised the government on issues pertaining to healthcare quality, including patient safety. Tejal Gandhi, MD, the president and CEO of NPSF, takes on a new title: chief clinical and safety officer of IHI. Prior to taking the helm of NPSF as the president and CEO, Dr. Gandhi, a board-certified inter- nist, was the executive director of quality and safety at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston for 10 years. Both leaders spoke with Becker's in April about the merger, what drew them to the patient safety field and what they hope their organization can achieve in the future. Note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity. Question: How will your role change after the merger? Dr. Tejal Gandhi: At IHI, I will be the chief clinical and safety officer. I will oversee all the safety work, and I will oversee the creation of a newly combined safety group. IHI also has a broader portfolio in quality, so I'm looking forward to being engaged in that as well. Derek Feeley: I will continue to be the CEO of the new organization. e nature of my role doesn't change too much, just the scope of it. Q: What makes NPSF and IHI compat- ible? DF: We know each other well. We've worked together for a number of years, and we started to realize there was real synergy between the two organizations and the work we do. One ex- ample of our compatibility would be the out- standing thought leadership at NPSF coupling with IHI's ability to disseminate services across large sections of the industry. We felt we could be more impactful together and realized the merger was the optimal thing to be doing. TG: If you look at the safety work we've been doing, we've been fo- cused on many of the same things such as changing leadership culture and taking a systems approach to improving patient safety. By com- ing together, we create a larger and more powerful voice, and right now the healthcare system is being bombarded by many voices. What NPSF and IHI are asking of the industry is so similar, it just makes sense to ask as a joint voice rather than adding to the multitude of voices that already exist. Q: How will the merger improve the ability of NPSF and IHI to aid healthcare leaders and clinicians in ensuring pa- tient safety is a top priority as the healthcare landscape continues to change? TG: I think one of the ways our single, more powerful voice can im- pact health systems is by bringing our different strengths together. We're able to make recommendations on safety improvements, and IHI can bring them to the front lines where they'll be implemented. DF: IHI has a great international reach that NPSF really doesn't have, so that's a way we can work together to improve healthcare not just in the U.S., but more broadly. e single voice is really important. IHI and NPSF can now speak with one voice with a single call to action with a common set of tools and approaches. Improving quality and safety is really the kind of work that needs to be done with "sense mak- ing." We can make sense of some of the complexities involved in this process with a mix of thought leadership and action. NPSF has been more of a think tank and IHI more of a do tank. At the moment there are groups that tend to go to either IHI or NPSF. Now we can reach them with a combined set of programs. Q: What drew you to the patient safety and quality field? DF: I've been working on this for a long time. Back in 2005-2006 I spent a year as a Harkness Fellow in Healthcare Policy with [Oakland, Calif.-based] Kaiser Permanente and the Department of Veterans Af- fairs. It was there I heard about the IHI's 100,000 Lives Campaign to reduce harm in hospitals. at was really my introduction to the world of safety and quality. I was determined to take back home to Scotland with me the basis of the 100,000 Lives program. We had every single hospital in the country implement a set of well-evidenced patient safe- ty interventions. Two things we did were to educate hospitals about the practicality of the inventions and empower the staff at the point of service. We wanted them to understand that this was not just a new set of policies or procedures; this was a new set of plans that actually empowered caretakers. "IHI and NPSF can now speak with one voice with a single call to action." — Derek Feeley