High reliability: USA Health launches effort to improve quality standards
USA Health employees are asked to report any safety issues or concerns and to relay safety success stories in which someone stepped up to prevent harm to patients or co-workers.
For several years, the healthcare industry has had many discussions about medical mistakes, their causes and how to prevent them. Additionally, a number of organizations have worked to develop measures of quality for healthcare providers and then tried to apply them to individual organizations. These efforts have triggered organizations to understand that solutions typically lie within their own walls and with their own people.
At USA Health, we are ready to make the shift from meeting the quality standards set by others to becoming a highly reliable organization that continually improves its quality and safety by taking a look at our processes and culture.
“In healthcare, we have implemented lots of individual projects to address specific issues,” said Michael Chang, MD, USA Health chief medical officer. “I don’t know of any healthcare organization that has not had hand-washing campaigns and other similar efforts. These are short-term fixes unless they actually become part of the culture of the organization. That is when we are able to make tremendous progress in enhancing the quality of care we provide. We need to adopt a mindset where our goal is Zero Harm.”
Chang notes that this effort must be front of mind for everyone within an organization and that it is a “marathon.”
USA Health has taken the initial steps of this journey by engaging Press Ganey/HPI to evaluate our organization. The assessment is not much different than other healthcare organizations. Most errors are driven by issues in process and culture.
To address the cultural issues, there are two things everyone within USA Health can begin doing immediately:
- If you are aware of a safety event or of safety issues/concerns, please report those to your manager or through RL6, the incident reporting system we launched in 2020; and
- If you are aware of safety success stories within USA Health, where someone stepped up to prevent harm to a patient or employee, please report that as well.
“Learning from when we have issues and celebrating when we prevent harm from occurring are two outcomes when you change an organization’s culture,” Chang said.
Educational sessions for leaders within USA Health have begun. This effort will teach our leaders how to define our values and expectations, find and correct problems that impact the delivery of safe care and provide feedback to ensure accountability for error prevention.
Time to be creative
There is an immediate need that each person within the health system can help with. USA Health’s safety program needs a slogan. It should be something memorable (and brief) so that everyone within the USA Health family will feel included and recognize what someone is talking about when they mention the slogan.
By Friday, May 28, at 5 p.m., submit your suggestions to USA Health Insider by emailing Carol McPhail, USA Health Marketing and Communications, at cmcphail@health.southalabama.edu. People leading the safety effort will narrow the choices down and then employees will have the chance to vote on a list of the top five safety program slogans.
