 Stephanie Nichols, MHHS Director of Quality Management; Tony Farmer, MHHS Assistant Vice-President; and Jennifer Croley, MHHS Quality Coordinator visit hospital departments at Morristown-Hamblen Healthcare System, in order to emphasize a collective effort for safer health care in honor of National Patient Safety Week. |
Hospital Patient Safety - A Road Taken Together Morristown-Hamblen Healthcare System (MHHS), healthcare organizations and patient groups across the globe have joined the National Patient Safety Foundation in celebration of Patient Safety Awareness Week, March 2-8. The theme of the week, Patient Safety: A Road Taken Together, emphasizes a collective effort for safer health care through partnership among providers, patients, families and communities. This week is intended to raise public awareness about the work being done to improve patient safety and the importance of effective partnering to these improvement efforts. Patient safety week is a time for reminding staff of the importance of their role in maintaining patient safety and including the patient and their families as active participants. The spotlight of this year's celebration at MHHS focuses on important safety issues that impact quality and safe care. The importance of hand-washing for patients and staff is one of the measures that is being stressed. "Good hand washing is the number one way to prevent the spread of the current outbreak of the flu virus, " states Tony Farmer, Assistant Vice-President at MHHS. "We encourage hand hygiene by placing sinks conveniently in all patient care areas and hand gel stations where they can be easily accessed by visitors." MHHS implements, maintains and upgrades many safety measures throughout the year. One of the measures that has increased patient safety is by becoming a participating hospital in the Institute of Healthcare Improvement's (IHI) 5 Million Lives Campaign. The Campaign asks participating hospitals to implement evidence-based interventions that help reduce patient harm. One intervention that MHHS implemented in 2006 was decreasing the incidence of ventilator-associated pneumonia. Statistics show that as many as 25 percent of all patients admitted to the ICU and placed on ventilators develop pneumonia, which can be fatal. " We have had no ventilator associated pneumonias in 15 months since we implemented the IHI standards in our critical care units," added Mr. Farmer. "This is evidence that the MHHS staff and physicians are following the guidelines and preventing deaths in this patient population". Also implemented was the Rapid Response Team. Hospitals have long had teams in place to respond quickly to patients who go into cardiac or respiratory arrest and are at high risk of death. The concept of the Rapid Response Team responding to patients in decline before they code is relatively new. At MHHS, the Rapid Response Team is made up of a critical care nurse, a respiratory therapist and a nursing supervisor who are on site 24 hours a day. Nurses can page the team if they sense a patient is headed for trouble. Signs can be respiratory distress, a change in consciousness or just a nurse's gut instinct. The team, along with physician guidance, stabilizes the patient or transfers them to critical care. In the two years that MHHS has had the Rapid Response Team in place, the hospital has had a reduction in the number of patients outside the critical care units who have coded. "We recognize that by establishing the Rapid Response Team, we have the potential to save lives and improve patient care, which aligns with one of our core values of providing excellence," Farmer further added. Some of the activities at MHHS Patient Safety Week included displays, educational materials and contests. Quality Management and Administration also traveled throughout the organization with a "Safety Cart" that provided education and received feedback from staff and patients on how to improve patient safety and provide quality care. |
