Large hospital uses ‘patient safety champions’ as one technique to create safer culture
Tuesday September 18, 2007 -- Natalie Miller
A large hospital with multiple sites is employing point people for patient safety as one of many techniques to create a safer experience for the approximately 2.3 million people Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) serves.

HHS has five distinct hospitals, a cancer centre and employs 10,000 staff.

As a patient safety specialist, Rosanne Zimmerman’s role involves supporting the co-ordination, planning and integration of patient safety initiatives and education into the culture of Hamilton Health Sciences.

Throughout the hospital’s departments and sites there are about 400 patient safety champions who are the “point people” staff can go to with patient safety issues for discussion and resolution.

"We have a large network of patient safety champions," says Zimmerman.

Among their many patient safety initiatives, the hospital has in place rapid response teams that provide frontline staff members access to a critical care team.

The teams are called the Rapid Assessment of Critical Events (RACE) Team, which are in place in the adult care units at the Hamilton General site, and the Pediatric Assessment of Critical Events (PACE) Team, which are in place at the McMaster Children’s Hospital site.

The hospital also has in place patient safety leadership walkarounds, which involve leaders regularly going to the frontlines and talking with staff about patient safety and collecting their feedback with the aim of resolving issues.

HHS is working on a ‘Transfer of Accountability’ project, which ultimately ensures standardized information is passed from nurse to nurse from shift to shift.

"All of information to provide safer care is (shared)," says Zimmerman. This is an ongoing program.

The hospital is involved in a medication safety initiative, which involves making medication administration safer and explores the use of certain technologies to dispense medications. The hospital has an occurrence reporting protocol in regards to patient safety to ensure patient safety related events or near misses are reported and systems for improvement are implemented.

HHS also has a medication reconciliation group which aims to ensure patients in hospital are receiving the medications they would normally take at home as appropriate.

In regards to the increased focus in healthcare on patient safety, Zimmerman says, "certainly the literature out there suggests there is a problem. We’re trying to make systems as safe as they can be."