St. Michael’s developing toolkit to support patient safety improvement
SafetyNET program to provide understanding of what works and what doesn’t
Thursday May 15, 2008 -- Jason Thompson
With potentially hundreds of individual patient safety and quality improvement exercises taking place in individual units at St. Michael’s Hospital, Ella Ferris says understanding what elements are successful across the organization is essential.

With funding from the Canadian Patient Safety Institute’s 2007 Research Competition, researchers at the Toronto hospital are preparing to launch the SafetyNET program as part of a study to determine what constitutes a successful system-wide approach to patient safety.

“SafetyNET is about understanding what makes it successful . . . but in the end the goal is to have a toolkit for anyone who would be interested in improving quality but needs the tools to do it,” says Ferris, executive vice-president of programs and chief nursing executive at St. Michael’s Hospital.

Ferris, along with Dr. Chris Hayes, the medical director of quality and patient safety at St. Michael’s Hospital, is leading the SafetyNET study.

Hayes and Ferris agree the success of the study depends on staff buy-in, as is anytime change is initiated in healthcare settings.

While he doesn’t expect complete buy-in from staff from the get-go, Hayes is confident that as the program builds momentum and people start networking ideas, others will be enticed to join.

“We’re creating a (network) of people who have identified themselves as interested or leaders in patient safety and quality,” Hayes says. “(Ferris) will be instrumental in providing organizational commitment and helping us with the buy-in.”

Ferris says acquiring support from the board of directors is the first step in creating an organizational philosophy of patient safety and quality improvement.

From there, the organization puts out a call for volunteers, or as Ferris puts it, “(people) with an interest in wanting to put some more structure around how they personally and professionally impact quality.”

Ferris also knows there are many prospective leaders in the organization who would not declare themselves as such. For this reason, unit managers are asked to nominate their staff members as champions within their units.

By creating a network of patient safety leaders, Ferris says people are able to learn from each other’s experiences and share best practices.

“The essence would be that you want to create these relationships and not always rely on your formal structure,” Ferris says. “We would want to know about it because we want to log the success of the project but you wouldn’t need approval to get together with your colleagues in another unit to come up with a quality plan.”

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