Safety 101 Syllabus: Prioritize Safety in Selection and Development of Leaders
Welcome back, class. Since posting our last lesson, the COVID-19 pandemic has spread across the globe and presented the healthcare field with new, never before seen obstacles. Between the high contagiousness and rapid spread of the virus, patient surges, shortages of personal protective equipment and ventilators, and limited testing supplies, keeping staff and patients safe […]
Redefining Criticism
(Members Only) Healthcare organizations are quick to laud, with good reason, employees who fix problems on the fly and make things work, all too often in the face of seemingly impossible situations and systemic barriers. Organizational leaders are sometimes less exuberant about employees who point out defects or potential sources of failure in our systems. […]
Five to Zero: How High Reliability Happens
(Members Only) In the mid-1980s, following a scathing attack on anesthesia safety by ABC television’s 20/20 program, Ellison “Jeep” Pierce Jr., MD, then president of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, conceived the idea of the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation, and the ubiquitous term “patient safety” was born out of this effort. Pierce’s vision was a […]
Engaging the Board in Patient Safety Goals
Over the past few decades, many hospitals and health systems have invested significant time and resources in building and reinforcing quality improvement and patient safety programs. This has led to declines in some medical error rates. For instance, central line-associated blood stream infections dropped by 50 percent between 2008 and 2016, and have continued to […]
The Promise and Practice of a Just Culture
Leaders whose organizations have made big safety gains will tell you that a high-reliability safety culture is one of shared learning characterized by an atmosphere of trust. Members of the workforce feel safe speaking up when they make an error or encounter circumstances that could lead to harm. And, since these high-performing organizations recognize that […]
Walk the Walk
What does it take to truly establish a culture of safety in your hospital? According to Mark P. Jarrett, MD, senior vice president and chief quality officer at Northwell Health in New York, the secret to success is none other than leadership. And, he claims, good leadership is ensuring that the culture will sustain itself […]
The Story as Catalyst for Change
As healthcare leaders we gather data and use the numbers to guide our decisions and make strategic plans for our organization’s future. Sometimes, however, we come across a patient story so revealing and so humbling that it compels us to act now. The all-to-real human experience as relayed to us by a distraught mother, by […]
The Role of Racism as a Core Patient Safety Issue
(Members Only) In February 2019, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health hosted a special symposium titled, “The Fierce Urgency of Now,” in honor of Shalon Irving, PhD, a JHBSPH alumna, who passed away unexpectedly in 2017 just weeks after giving birth to her first daughter, Soleil. Irving was black, and the circumstances of […]
Safety: The Importance of Culture
(Members Only) November 2019 marks the 20-year anniversary of To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System. Since then, we have invested a great deal of resources to reduce errors, and we have made progress. As examples, infection rates are lower, fewer falls have occurred, and, it is reported, the number of patient deaths […]
High Reliability Healthcare
The ultimate goal for healthcare providers is zero harm to patients, families and the workforce. In order to achieve and maintain this in the long-run, you have to learn how to walk before you can run. Patient safety expert, Dr. Michael Shabot, offers healthcare leaders the foundational tools to measure, build and sustain a culture […]