The Resilience in Stressful Events program developed at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore to deliver emotional support to providers after a medical error or stressful patient-related event could save hospitals more than $1.5 million annually, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Patient Safety.
To assess the possible cost benefits of the RISE program, which trains healthcare professionals to deliver emotional support to colleagues, researchers first sought to establish the cost of the program. The research team established this number by accounting for the hours RISE peer responders spent aiding colleagues and not doing billable work from 2015 to 2016. The annual cost came out to be $656 per clinician.
To establish the potential monetary benefits of the program, researchers conducted nurse surveys. The surveys asked how likely nurses would be to take time off or quit their job after a stressful patient-related with RISE peer support and without support from RISE. As replacing a nurse can cost as much as $100,000, researchers determined the net cost savings per nurse who was served by the RISE program between 2015 and 2016 to be $22,576, which brought the annual total savings for the hospital to $1.81 million.
"Nurses were almost four times as likely to predict that they would leave their job after a high-impact patient event (an unexpected death, for example) in which they did not get peer support, than they were if they got RISE support," William Padula, PhD, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and one of the study's authors, wrote in a post on the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality blog. "The total benefit to all employees was probably much larger because the study looked only at nurses served by the program. Replacing a single attending physician, for instance, can cost several hundred thousand dollars."
More articles on quality:
IHI on the BCRA: Removing 22M from health coverage 'takes us backward, not forward'
Patient safety expert Tejal Gandhi honored at HFMA
8 in 10 parents give kids wrong medication dose, study suggests