Marin General Hospital Celebrates Patient Safety Awareness Week

From Marin General Hospital: This week is Patient Safety Awareness Week (PSAW), sponsored by the National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF). Each year, PSAW focuses on safety culture and patient engagement. PSAW is an opportunity for hospitals and health systems to share their work and resources on patient safety, safety culture and patient engagement.

At Marin General Hospital, we utilize this week to share our work and resources on patient safety, safety culture and patient engagement. We promote safety through team huddles and messages that focus on excellence. The more we share and speak up, the more we encourage and hardwire the behaviors and processes that make this an exceptional place to give and receive care. A few of the activities we that help promote a safe environment include include:

Our Promise to Patients: Keep You Safe ● Heal You ● Care for You, and we honor this promise through our Operation Safety Program that teaches physicians and care team members high reliability and safety tools for improved communication, teamwork, and outcomes.

The Safety Hero Award

A part of Operation Safety where we get to recognize and celebrate our staff who go out of their way to detect the potential for error, speak up for safety, and improve our processes. We incorporate safety as the first item on every meeting agenda and our leadership team begins every day with a safety huddle to communicate important information and concerns.

Operation Safety Training

Every employee at Marin General Hospital participates in a 3.5-hour Operation Safety Training where they learn how to effectively identify and correct individual and/or system failures that may lead to safety events, in order to prevent them from reoccurring. We’ve also recently launched Unit Councils, which are teams of employees from the same department working together to find ways to improve operations and care in their areas. Each of these Unit Councils is working on at least one safety-related project. Empowering front line staff to self-organize and collaborate to work on their own ideas is safety in action!

HEART (Healing, Empathy, Accountability, Resolution, Trust) Program

A holistic approach and methodology designed to reduce harm in healthcare and support patients, family members, and clinicians after an adverse event. We do this by targeting specific strategies to measure our safety culture, detect and investigate events more rapidly, and improve communication and transparency. Care for the caregiver is another key domain of this program.

Team Rounding?

Two years ago, we implemented Team Rounding. This is a best practice where physicians and nurses visit patients together to review and discuss their care plan. Listening with empathy is a key hallmark of this program. Also, having the team together in the same room at the same time not only improves relationships between patients and care team members, but patients receive more complete information and better understand their care plan. Plus, there is much less room for error when everyone communicates as a team.

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