Dateline DFCI
Dana-Farber helps develop checklist for hospital leaders to assess their commitment to improving patient safety
Have you sought to establish an environment of trust? Talked openly about patient-safety matters? Set policies around error reporting? Walked the hospital as a patient?
These are some of the questions hospital executives may ask themselves using a checklist designed to help leaders gauge and increase their commitment to patient safety. The tool was developed by Institute Senior Vice President and Chief Operations Officer Jim Conway and others and published as a brochure by the American Hospital Association (AHA).
DFCI's Jim Conway was instrumental in developing this patient-safety checklist for hospital executives.
"It is clear from our work and the work of others that executives must be visible and active in leading patient-safety improvements," Conway states in the introduction.
He has demonstrated that initiative since joining Dana-Farber in 1995, pressing continually for quality improvements, such as computerized chemotherapy order-entry systems to prevent mistakes, and advisory councils to provide patient and family perspectives in decision-making about care.
Along with DFCI colleagues, Conway is active nationally in efforts to reduce medical errors and enhance safety, traveling frequently to speak about lessons learned from two tragic medication overdoses here in the mid-1990s.
Conway's efforts were recognized this past fall when he received one of two Individual Leadership Awards in Patient Safety from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations and the National Committee for Quality Assurance. He said the recognition was "a direct reflection of the hard work and commitment of Dana-Farber's trustees, administrators, staff, and patients and their families."
The self-assessment tool Conway helped devise asks users to answer 46 yes-or-no questions in the areas of personal education, policy setting, communication, and advocacy. It also encourages executives to list short- and long-term goals for promoting the importance of patient safety.
Mailed to chief executive officers in hospitals around the country, Strategies for Leadership: Hospital Executives and Their Role in Patient Safety can be downloaded from the AHA's Web site at www.aha.org by going to "Quality and Patient Safety," then "Patient Safety," then "Culture of Safety." The Massachusetts Coalition for the Prevention of Medical Errors and the Massachusetts Hospital Association contributed to the project.
According to Conway, the checklist "is not intended to seek a 'pass/fail' grade, but rather to give individuals and groups of leaders a range of choices to consider, periodically revisit, and use to trigger action. ... I do believe the tool reflects much of the best learning to date."
