Protecting-Learning-Preventing

PROTECTING. LEARNING. PREVENTING.

PROTECTING…your safety and quality work

As a federally-designated Patient Safety Organization (PSO), the Center for Patient Safety supports and encourages health care providers to share information about vulnerabilities in the health care system that can lead to medical mistakes and patient harm. By learning what adverse events occur, why they occur and how to prevent them, as well as sharing that learning, we support efforts to reduce medical mistakes and patient harm. The Centers’ PSO services offer a seamless way for licensed healthcare providers to work collaboratively to learn how to reduce serious events and patient harm within the federal confidentiality and privilege protections of the federal Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005.

LEARNING…to improve culture and safety

A strong cultural foundation that supports communication, teamwork, and leadership may be the most important step to improving patient safety in any environment. The Center provides valuable diagnostic tools and evidence-based programs to monitor and improve teamwork and communication among doctors, nurses, paramedics, and other members of the healthcare team. Culture assessment services are available for hospitals, EMS, physician offices and long-term care facilities, in addition to training on implementation of culture programs.
Services include:

• Survey on Patient Safety Culture: surveys to assess the safety culture of the organization
• Just Culture: training and support for Just Culture^TM, a program that improves an organization’s response to system safety issues and staff behavioral choices
• Comprehensive Unit-Based Safety Program (CUSP): training and collaboration in the implementation of teamwork and performance improvement
• resources and services to support safety culture, including comprehensive training and education

PREVENTING…by being proactive

The Center offers participants a unique way to safely learn about adverse events, near misses and unsafe conditions and proactively implement activities to effectively improve care.
Services include:

• Patient Safety Snapshot: a bi-weekly email of important patient safety news
• Newsletters
• Safety Alerts & Watches
• Annual patient safety conferences
• Reported event dashboards (PSO participants only)
• Direct access to Center staff as resources, including national patient safety experts in most healthcare provider fields (PSO participants only)
• Safe Table event discussions (PSO participants only)
• As a PSO, the Center’s extensive database of reported events allows analysis of thousands of events from hundreds of healthcare providers to locate trends and areas of concern within, and across, various provider types.  These analyses are shared in newsletters, annual reports, PSO supplemental reports, Safety Alerts and Watches, articles, and other outlets to ensure broad outreach.