Indiana hospitals offer patient safety assurances

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March 11, 2008

by Jamie Hergott The Tribune Star Tue Mar 11, 2008, 11:09 AM EDT

AVON, Ind. — Following a recent and extensive public health notification in Las Vegas, local hospitals want to assure residents here that patient safety is a top priority.

The Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada had its business license revoked when health inspectors noticed staff reusing vials to administer medicine, possibly infecting thousands of people with tainted blood containing Hepatitis C or HIV, according to an Associated Press report.

Patty Owens, director of care coordination and patient safety officer of Hendricks Regional Health, says the hospital has always been concerned about patient safety and is involved in numerous initiatives to continuously improve it.

“You can’t expect there to be a perfect place,” Owens said. “But we take patient safety very seriously. We are working very hard to prevent harm, and if it occurs, we work very hard to find out what happened. We want to be worthy of the trust of our community.”

Owens’ passion for patient safety is evident; her calendar is full of meetings and as far as she’s concerned, the possibilities for improving patient safety are limitless.

In 2006, HRH committed to combining all of the initiatives from all of the organizations they worked with — National Patient Safety Foundation, Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, etc. — and organized them into four categories: preventing hospital-acquired infections, improving the culture of patient safety, improving medical safety, and reducing the risks for patients.

The hospital has a patient safety committee, consisting of 25 members from all levels and buildings of the HRH medical group. These members meet on a regular basis to organize and implement patient safety standards from a number of organizations. Owens also presents the progress of the committee to the hospital’s board of directors once a month.

HRH isn’t the only local hospital making pain-staking efforts to embrace patient safety.

Lisa Sparks, director of clinical excellence at Clarian West Medical Center, said in the mid- to late-1990s, there was a movement concerning patient safety in healthcare. About that time, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement released reports showing the number of patient deaths in hospitals, instigating patient safety initiatives.

“People used to be afraid to report incidents,” Sparks said. “I think healthcare has taken great steps in the last five to seven years away from that and engage people to report things that go wrong.”

Both hospitals are continuously asking their staff for feedback and implementing practices to ensure safety.

Owens said that according to medical research, 1 percent of mistakes in hospitals had to do with human error while the other 99 percent were directly related to the processes in place.

“We want to teach the staff that it’s OK to report things that didn’t go as well as planned,” Owens said. “We consider these a gift to us. It shows us what we need to fix so that it won’t happen again.”

An important part of continuing patient safety, Owens stressed, is hospital culture. She said that it’s important to have a culture where staff members feel comfortable reporting mistakes or deviant behavior and patients feel safe addressing staff about questions and concerns.

Clarian West also has a similar committee called Bedside Caregivers which acts as mini patient safety officers for individual departments. One example of a process put into place as a result of discussions with this committee was to decrease the risk of patient falls. Patients who have a high-risk for falling are given red booties to wear as well as a red magnet to place outside their door. This way, any caregiver will know immediately to keep a close eye on that patient. These precautions were in addition to alarms that are installed on the hospital beds themselves that ring a nurse when a high-risk patient has left the bed.

“None of us want patients to be scared of healthcare because it’s so wonderful today,” Sparks said. “We try to teach patients to be proactive and that it’s OK to ask questions. They should understand everything that’s happening.”

Jamie Hergott writes for the Hendricks County Flyer in Avon, Ind.