Patient Safety

At St. Joseph’s, we understand how much confidence patients and their family members place in us. We consider that confidence a sacred trust and believe nothing we do is more important than working to provide the safest environment possible for patients. Our goal and organizational priority is to foster a culture of safety that values reporting, disclosure of events (including near misses) and process improvement. To accomplish this goal, our Patient Safety Committee provides a foundation for reporting, surveillance and analysis of event processes for co-workers and physicians. This committee follows a Patient Safety Plan that gives framework for a Culture of Safety.

Choose from the links below for more information about St. Joseph’s patient safety initiatives:

Safety Objectives

Creating a Culture of Safety

Medication Safety

Infection Rates

Safety Objectives

National Patient Safety Goals – St. Joseph’s strives to meet rigorous safety goals, with an objective of providing the highest standards of safety when delivering health care to patients. The National Patient Safety Goals outline some of what St. Joseph’s has implemented to obtain top quality care and the safe practices it is dedicated to providing.

View the St. Joseph’s National Patient Safety Goals (PDF)
Click here to view St. Joseph's SafetyFirst Book.

Universal Protocol – St. Joseph’s co-workers have created a Universal Protocol for preventing all patients who come to the hospital for invasive surgery from experiencing wrong site, wrong procedure and wrong person accidents. Patients are compelled to rely on our staff at a time when they are most vulnerable, so St. Joseph’s involves them in the marking of their surgical site. The staff also utilizes a “timeout” before every invasive procedure, which halts the team so that the right patient, right procedure and right site can be verified before surgery continues.

Mercy Alerts – St. Joseph’s is a member of the large, multi-facility Sisters of Mercy Health System (Mercy). The Sisters of Mercy believe their
co-workers are the industry’s most competent and caring, but also realize that human beings sometime make mistakes. With that in mind,
St. Joseph’s encourages its co-workers to report events or near misses – without the fear of punishment – to their supervisors. The proactive approach allows co-workers from all of the different facilities to learn from these events and adopt suggested action plans. Sharing of the unfortunate safety events also allows for the sharing of best practices and methods to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

Creating a Culture of Safety
Our President/CEO and senior leaders promote a “Culture of Safety” by supporting a non-punitive policy for St. Joseph’s co-workers. Competent and caring as they may be, our co-workers are human beings who sometimes make mistakes and they should not fear punishment for reporting safety events or near-misses. Moreover, St. Joseph’s started Leadership Safety Rounds to connect senior leaders with healthcare professionals who are working on the front line with patients. The Leadership Rounds give those co-workers an opportunity to express their safety concerns related to patients and coworkers and get immediate action from St. Joseph’s senior leaders.

Medication Safety

Medication Reconciliation – Physicians, pharmacists and nurses work as a team to ensure correct medication information is communicated and correct. They also strive to ensure that patients understand their entire drug regimens before they are discharged. St. Joseph’s staff also works with the patients to obtain a comprehensive list of their current medications on admission and reconcile this list during all stages of care.

Dangerous Abbreviations – Healthcare professional often rely on handwritten communication, making legibility and clarity of meaning critical. St. Joseph’s prohibits the use of abbreviations that have been proven to be easily confused in written communications. The “Do Not Use” abbreviations effort is a part of the National Patient Safety Goals and are supported by JCAHO and CMS.

Safe Medication Practice Recognition – Arkansas Educational Television Network (AETN) named St. Joseph’s a “Champion of Change” in the fall of 2006 for its innovative “Mercy Meds” program. St. Joseph’s implemented the process – which involves automated medication dispensing cabinetry, bedside point-of-care medication verification technology and the deployment of pharmacists to high-risk medication areas in the spring of 2005. All the inpatient units participate in the use of computerized system for medication administration.

Infection Control

Nosocomial Infections (infections contracted in hospitals) is the fourth largest killer in the United States. St. Joseph’s is committed to PREVENT AND CONTROL infections.

Hand Hygiene is the single most important way to reduce hospital infections. At St. Joseph’s we have alcohol foam and soap available in every patient room. Staff members are to perform hand hygiene before and after patient care. A program called “It’s Okay to Ask” has been implemented and informs patients and visitors that it is okay to ask their caregivers to perform hand hygiene. Also, in an effort to decrease infection, staff members are no longer allowed to wear artificial nails, nail polish or have nails greater than ¼” in length.

Surgical site infections (SSIs) account for 14 to 16 percent of all hospital-acquired infections and are a common complication of care. St. Joseph’s participates in the SIP (Surgical Infection Prevention) project and the SCIP (Surgical Care Improvement Project), and has enjoyed great success with decreasing the number of surgical site infections

Below are web sites that can give you additional information about infection prevention and control:

JCAHO

PreventInfection.org

Medqic.org

Center For Disease Control

apic

CDC Surgical Site