Earning the public's trust

The alarming incidents (and skyrocketing statistics) of preventable medical errors are well documented. And improving patient safety necessitates work across many fronts that span increased awareness, communication, innovation, transparency...and building more trust with those that vow, first and foremost, to do no harm.

In efforts to not only increase patient safety but to maintain trust, Hendricks Regional Health (HRH) in Avon, Indiana formed a Patient Safety Committee in 2006 consisting of 25 members from all levels and buildings of the medical group. The members meet on a regular basis to organize and implement patient safety standards from a number of organizations.

According to Indiana's TribStar: “You can’t expect there to be a perfect place,” Patty Owens, director of care coordination, 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.”

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.

Owens also presents the progress of the committee to the hospital’s board of directors once a month and says, "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." She further explains: “We want to teach the staff that it’s OK to report things that didn’t go as well as planned. 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. 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."

In order to dramatically improve patient safety, open and transparent cultures in hospitals should not only be the goal--it needs to be the standard. So too is employing systems that provide the ability to institute benchmarks and progress.

Hospitals, like HRH, with strong Patient Safety Boards is a pivotal step towards maintaining the public's trust--and just as hospitals work to improve the diligence of their people, it's paramount that they work to improve their feedback and auditing processes. After all, trust is not given, it's earned. And responsibility must be demonstrated every single day, with every patient, through each and every process.

Full article referenced above can be accessed here.