Hospitals have become safer for patients in the past few years, but there is a long way to go, according to three health system leaders.
On Sept. 17, executives at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, MedStar Health in Columbia, Md., and Prisma Health in Greenville, S.C., shared recent wins at a patient safety forum hosted by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Last September, the council outlined steps to improve patient safety. A year later, leaders in the healthcare industry spoke to a theme of hope.
Patient safety means the application of safety science methods to achieve trust in healthcare delivery, according to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. It also minimizes the incidence and impact of — and maximizes recovery from — adverse events, such as hospital-acquired infections and life-threatening medication errors.
For more than 32,000 employees at Prisma Health, patient safety goals were manifested into a new clinical operating system called Pulse, which launched during the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated economic and workforce turmoil.
Pulse has led to 30% fewer serious safety events and a safety culture 20 percentage points above the national average, according to Jonathan Gleason, MD, Prisma's executive vice president and chief clinical officer.
Greta S. Harper, MD, vice president and chief medical officer of acute care at Prisma, said anonymous reporting was over 50%. A year after Pulse launched, this hesitance to share their names fell to 13%.
Despite these successes, the system is "not where we want to be," Dr. Gleason said. Rollin J. "Terry" Fairbanks, MD, MedStar's senior vice president and chief quality and safety officer, and Stephen Muething, MD, Cincinnati Children's Hospital's senior advisor of strategic partnerships, echoed his comment.
At Cincinnati Children's, for example, 365 days have passed since the last serious safety event for a child. Dr. Muething called this "not good enough."