Risk Management Starts with Me and You!

The start of a New Year is also an opportunity for renewal of initiatives, of goals and objectives.  In October, I attended the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management (ASHRM) national conference. ASHRM has always focused on risk management and patient safety, however, at the conference, the organization announced a renewed vision and mission statement to include managing risks across the healthcare enterprise.  While this may not be surprising to many risk managers, for those focused more exclusively on clinical risks, it promotes the role of risk manager to be involved in all operational risks.

Getting to Zero through the Power of One

While some uncertainty of national healthcare reform has continued into the New Year, patient safety remains a high priority for healthcare organizations.  The theme of the 2012 conference laid out a common goal of zero medical errors through a collaborative effort starting with the C-suite.  The ASHRM video called “Getting to Zero through the Power of One”  advocates a strategy of doing this by making patient safety the top priority, leadership setting the example of doing the right thing and empowering individual employees.

Getting Everyone Involved

Many healthcare organizations have already taken measures to empower their staff to do the right thing.  One example is the Children’s National Medical Center who created a video education tool to give their employees permission to speak up, report errors, stop the line and escalate actions when needed.  It’s called “Keeping Our Kids Safe.” A simple philosophy of making patient safety everyone’s responsibility.

What are some of the things you can do to implement a similar policy?

·         Promote a culture of open communication.

·         Educate ALL personnel on their responsibilities in patient safety – make it a priority during new employee education and annual education updates.

·         Start with the C-suite setting specific examples and others will follow.

·         Set up and promote a proactive reporting system to identify enterprise safety issues so that early resolution will avoid not only patient, but staff and visitor injuries as well.

·         Collaborate with your peer who may have already implemented successful strategies to reduce errors.

The Partnership for Patients initiative, spearheaded by the federal government using money allocated by the Affordable Health Care Act, is a public-private partnership to improve the quality and safety of patient care.  Their two goals are to reduce hospital-acquired conditions by 40% and to cut hospital readmissions by 20%.  Strategies to enhance patient safety have encouraged collaboration among healthcare providers and advanced some innovative and positive changes in how care is delivered.

Start off 2013 by renewing your efforts to “Getting to Zero”.  Take a “hands-on” approach to demonstrate how you want your employees to act.  And feel free to contact our Healthcare Practice Group to help educate you, your C-Suite and staff in some of the ways to increase safety.

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