March 7, 2005
Massachusetts hospitals join together to improve care and reduce errors
Saul Weingart, MD, PhD
Dana-Farber was one of the first healthcare organizations to participate in an ambitious program to improve patient safety in the state's 105 hospitals.
Joining the "Patients First" program – sponsored by the Massachusetts Hospital Association (MHA) and the Massachusetts Organization of Nurse Executives (MONE) – is voluntary, but hospitals that do so agree to meet certain goals, such as regularly discussing patient safety at trustee meetings and annually submitting nurse staffing plans to state public health officials.
The MHA will publish online which hospitals have enrolled, and report their progress toward the goals. Thirty-one institutions, including Dana-Farber, have so far joined the program. Dana-Farber hosted the news conference Jan. 26, where the program was unveiled, because of its leadership in patient safety and patient-centered care.
By signing up, hospitals agree to:
- inform patients, their families, and the public about safe staffing;
- promote a supportive work environment in which safety is a top priority;
- report their own performance on a series of nationally recognized safety and quality measurements;
- offer nurses in-house education, innovative career ladders, mentoring opportunities, and scholarship programs to help relieve the nursing shortage; and
- educate the public about how quality and safety can be improved.
"'Patients First' is very much aligned with the work we are already doing in patient safety," says Saul N. Weingart, MD, vice president for patient safety. "We welcome this collaboration with other Massachusetts hospitals and were eager to be among the first to sign up. We have a robust patient safety program in place already. We are, for example, working aggressively on a medication reconciliation initiative that fits with the Patients First program. It will allow us to make sure each patient's medications are up to date – from the moment they enter care until the moment they leave."
Patricia Reid Ponte, RN, DNSc, FAAN
'Powerful lessons'
The idea for a statewide patient-safety program emerged through focus groups formed by the MHA and MONE that included chief executive officers, chief medical officers, and chief nursing officers. These groups met for six months to discuss hospital staffing, care design, quality outcomes, and cultures of safety; among its participants was patient safety leader Patricia Reid Ponte, RN, DNSc, FAAN, vice president for Nursing and Patient Care Services and chief of Nursing at Dana-Farber, and director of Oncology Nursing and Clinical Services at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
"In developing this framework, there have been some powerful lessons about the great strides that can be made when hospitals work together on mutual goals, such as safer patient care," explains Reid Ponte. "We have been able to look beyond the scope of our individual institutions and embrace a more global mission of excellence. By pooling our talent and resources, we can be more effective in our own organizations."
Hospitals that sign the "Patients First Pledge" also vow to participate in the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's campaign to save (100) 000-1999 report from the Institute of Medicine estimating that medical errors kill between 44,000 and 98,000 patients each year in American hospitals). This nonprofit healthcare organization, once based in the Longwood Medical area but now located in Cambridge, is enlisting hospitals to improve in several areas – such as creating a rapid response team to examine patients at the first sign that their condition has declined.
Lucian Leape, MD, a Harvard School of Public Health professor and nationally known patient-safety expert who lectured at Dana-Farber last year, said at the press conference that the hospitals "are not just putting out a bunch of platitudes. Patients have a right to hold hospitals accountable for such things as staffing ratios. A year from now, we have the right to ask the hospitals what they've accomplished."
For more information, please visit www.patientsfirstma.org.