Increased safety important regardless of patient population
Friday October 19, 2007 -- Jason Thompson
It doesn’t matter how many patients are affected, what’s important is that healthcare organizations strive for increased patient safety whenever possible.

That’s the message Barbara Hennessey, a clinical nurse specializing in cardiology at The Moncton Hospital, has been sharing with her peers. Hennessey is also the team lead for Safer Healthcare Now’s (SHN) Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI) intervention.

Hennessey says other organizations have asked why The Moncton Hospital is still involved in the intervention when 85 per cent of AMI patients are transferred to Saint John Regional Hospital.

She responds by saying that although the amount of data gathered is small because of the high number of patient transfers, it was enough to provide improved care for patients. Hennessey says it also presented a unique opportunity to take part in a national quality improvement initiative.

“There’s a great number of them that wouldn’t have qualified for the AMI initiative but we chose to look at their information anyway just to make sure we’re on the right track,” Hennessey says. “The idea being that we wanted to optimize best practice and best care to our patients no matter whether they’re part of this quality improvement or not.”

Hennessey adds the AMI team has met the baseline targets established by SHN and the decision was made to set targets higher than what was expected of them as SHN participants.

“We really wanted to keep getting better and we noticed in our tracking . . . we did see that trend happening,” she says.

Because of the work the AMI team at The Moncton Hospital has been doing, they were asked by SHN’s Atlantic Node to lead other AMI teams in a conference call. The call was held Sept. 12 and the presentation was given by patient safety co-ordinator Margaret Meier.

“(The Atlantic Node) wanted to provide information to people in the Atlantic region and to have the chance to talk to people at different stages if their initiative . . . and to find out if there was any assistance we could provide for them,” Hennessey says of the conference call.

A second conference call, this time led by Hennessey, has been scheduled for Dec. 5 from 1 to 2 p.m. (ADT). To participate in the call, phone 1-866-368-6248. The participation code is 1604782 #.

For more information, visit www.saferhealthcarenow.ca.