St. Edward Mercy Patient Safety

It has been reported that as many as 180,000 deaths occur in the United States each year due to errors in medical care. Many of these errors are preventable. As a result, organizations across the country from the Joint Commission to business groups are calling on hospitals to develop new and better ways to improve patient safety. St. Edward Mercy Medical Center has established patient safety as one of its goals and is an organizational priority. We are committed to a culture of patient safety through the adherence of nationally recognized patient safety goals and measures. The organization also takes a proactive stance on patient safety. St. Edward Mercy monitors and analyzes processes that may have the potential for causing a serious incident and implements safeguards into place to prevent other incidents.

There is a committee in place that monitors patient safety in the hospital. Some of the goals of the committee are:

• Increasing awareness on patient safety and fostering an improved environment for non-punitive reporting.
• Improving communication openness throughout the facility.
• Meet or exceed the Joint Commission's National Patient Safety Goals (NPSG)
• Ensure that co-workers will educate and involve patients and their families about their role in helping facilitate the safe delivery of care

The hospital has an active Patient Safety Committee which sets goals, establishes policies, and monitors compliance of patient safety areas within the medical center. Activities performed or monitored by the Patient Safety Committee include the following:

• National Patient Safety Goals (NPSG)—Oversight of organizational compliance to each NPSG, as published by the Joint Commission.
• Routine Quality Monitoring Indicators—patient falls, medication related events, adverse drug reactions, patient restraints, blood product usage/transfusion reactions, resuscitation outcomes, infection control, organizational responses to Joint Commission Sentinel Event Alerts, Mercy Alerts, Healthcare Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (HFMEA) and  Environmental Safety.
• Patient Safety Initiatives — Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), Executive Patient Safety Rounds, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Patient Safety Indicators (PSI)

• Message from the CEO
• St. Edward Mercy 2006 Patient Safety Goals
• St. Edward Mercy Joins the IHI Campaigns
• Preventing Infections
• Fall Prevention
• Mercy Alerts
• Medication Safety
• Bar Code Technology (Bridge)
• Medication Reconciliation
• Healthcare Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (HFMEA)
• Executive Patient Safety Rounding