Journal of patient safety
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Journal of patient safety · Sep 2012
A safety culture transformation: its effects at a children's hospital.
To improve pediatric patient safety at a tertiary, 200-bed children's hospital by changing the safety culture and implementing processes, practices, and measures to sustain improvements. Although many core quality and safety measures exist for adult acute-care facilities, equivalent measures for pediatrics are lacking. ⋯ The initiative led to key improvements in safety culture and patient safety and also had a broad impact on several clinical quality outcome measures. Using safety metrics improves transparency and enables future benchmarking with peer institutions to help improve pediatric patient safety nationwide. Because of the initiative's success in our children's hospital, the entire Spectrum Health system, including more than 16,000 staff members, is now undertaking a similar effort.
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Journal of patient safety · Sep 2012
The cost of harm and savings through safety: using simulated patients for leadership decision support.
The ultimate objective of this program is to provide an approach to understanding and communicating health-care harm and cost to compel health-care provider leadership teams to vote "yes" to investments in patient safety initiatives, with the confidence that clinical, financial, and operational performance will be improved by such programs. ⋯ The final result of this project was to demonstrate a prototype leadership decision-support investment model approach that addresses clinical, operational, and financial performance for typical hospitals.
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Journal of patient safety · Jun 2012
Safety in the home healthcare sector: development of a new household safety checklist.
Unsafe household conditions could adversely affect safety and quality in home health care. However, risk identification tools and procedures that can be readily implemented in this setting are lacking. To address this need, we developed and tested a new household safety checklist and accompanying training program. ⋯ Home healthcare paraprofessionals can be effectively trained to identify commonplace household hazards. Using this checklist as a guide, visual household inspections were easily performed by trained HHCPS. Additional studies are needed to evaluate the reliability of the checklist and to determine if hazard identification leads to interventions that improve performance outcomes.
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Journal of patient safety · Mar 2012
An examination of opportunities for the active patient in improving patient safety.
Patients can make valuable contributions to their health care safety. Little is known, however, about the factors that could affect patient participation in safety-related aspects of their health care management. Examining and understanding how patient involvement in safety-related behaviors can be conceptualized will allow greater insight into why patients may be more willing to participate in some behaviors more than others may. ⋯ We believe that thinking of patient involvement in safety relating to properties and characteristics of the behavior together with the barriers to involvement could aid the design, implementation, and evaluation of interventions aimed at encouraging patient participation. It will also enable a greater understanding and assessment of not only what interventions may be effective (at encouraging patient involvement) but when they might be effective (i.e., what stage of the care pathway) and why.