Lake Forest Hospital Staff Win Patient Safety Award

LAKE FOREST, IL — Northwestern Medicine Lake Forest Hospital staff last week received a team award from a patient safety organization.

Six nurses at Lake Forest Hospital were honored by the Midwest Alliance for Patient Safety, a Naperville-based subsidiary of the Illinois Hospital Association.

Northwestern Medicine Lake Forest Hospital President Thomas McAfee said in a statement that it was an honor for hospital staff to recognized for their dedication to improving patient safety.

"This has always been a top priority for our organization, and the team’s commitment to identifying processes that deliver the highest standard of patient safety has been exemplary," McAfee said.

The team was credited with a significant reduction in hospital-acquired pressure injuries in recent years.

As many as 2.5 million people in the United States suffer from such injuries every year, which are sometimes known as bedsores and were called pressure ulcers until 2016.

In the fiscal year ending in September 2019, there were 29 pressure injuries at the hospital. The following year, which included the first six months of the coronavirus outbreak in Illinois, there were 61.

For the most recent fiscal year, which was nearly complete at the time data was submitted to the patient safety organization, there were only 10 such injuries, according to a hospital spokesperson.

Clinicians and frontline Lake Forest Hospital leaders held weekly meetings and walkthroughs during the workday as part of the hospital's strategy to reduce the number of pressure injuries acquired by patients at the hospital.

They determined early intervention is needed to improve patient outcomes and reviewed data to identify which interventions were the most effective at preventing the injuries, according to hospital representatives.

“This is where real-time coaching came into play,” Kathryn Thomas, director of quality and patient safety and one of the award-winning team members, said in a statement. “Real-time coaching allowed for near real-time defect identifications and subsequently real-time correction."

In addition to Thomas, Lake Forest Hospital's other winners included Mechelle Krause, a clinical practice wound specialist; Karen Mahnke, director of operations and associate chief nurse executive; Denise Majeski, vice president of operations and chief nurse executive; Laura Meller, director of operations; and Lindsay Werth, patient safety program manager.

The patient safety organization's individual award went to J. Steve Harweger, a gastroenterology nurse practitioner at GHN Memorial Hospital in Freeport, Illinois. According to the organization, Harweger's attention to detail while reviewing a 69-year-old patient's medical records wound up saving the man's life.