The big news from last week’s Patient Safety Congress held in Boston was the announcement that a National Steering Committee for Patient Safety will create a coordinated national action plan to prevent healthcare harm.
The national steering committee is co-chaired by Jeff Brady, M.D., director of the Center for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and Tejal Gandhi, M.D., chief clinical and safety officer for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). The merged IHI and National Patient Safety Foundation are the sponsors of the annual Patient Safety Congress.
The National Action Plan is meant to coordinate the efforts that are now underway from literally dozens of healthcare-related groups, ranging from AARP, to the American Hospital Association, Joint Commission, and American Nurses Association.
“For decades, experts have called for increased coordination to improve patient safety, but such a strategy has not been fully instituted,” Gandhi said. “There is still so much work to be done in patient safety, in part because we’ve reached the limits of what a ‘project-by-project’ approach can achieve. Instead of declaring ‘mission accomplished,’ we need to take steps to advance total systems safety—safety that is systematic and uniformly applied across the health system.”
MHA has taken on a similar project within the commonwealth. The MHA Statewide Quality Forum is devising and implementing a statewide educational strategy for alleviating violence in the healthcare workplace.