USA Health wins award for safety improvement

By Carol McPhail
[email protected]

USA Health is one of eight healthcare organizations in the nation to win an award from healthcare consultant Press Ganey for improving safety by significantly reducing serious safety events.

USA Health won the HX Achievement Award for Serious Safety Event Rate Reduction for achieving a more than 70% reduction in the system-level serious safety event rate. A serious safety event is a variation from expected practice that results in death, permanent harm or severe temporary harm. USA Health also demonstrated corresponding strong scores in safety culture perception regarding comfort level of reporting and a healthy trend in safety event reporting.

“This award shows that USA Health is committed to making safety our top priority,” said Becky Pomrenke, M.S.N., RN, CNL, CNS, patient safety manager for USA Health. “This leads our performance improvement and quality initiatives ensuring that we are constantly looking for ways to improve and provide the best possible care to our patients. The award shows that through hard work, dedication and habit formation, Safety Starts with Me works in decreasing patient harm.”

Chief Medical Officer Michael Chang, M.D., said USA Health continues to move in the direction of meeting the definition of high reliability. “At USA Health, we define high reliability as ‘performance as intended, consistent over time.’”

In January 2020, USA Health created a robust safety department and launched the Safety Starts with Me initiative to guide the health system on its journey toward high reliability. USA Health partnered with Press Ganey to build a comprehensive program that was tailored to meet its unique needs.

“Through systemwide education on universal skills, fair and just culture, and safety leadership skills training, we have set the expectations for all staff that safety comes first,” Pomrenke said. “Building the safety coach program has also been essential by having frontline staff involved in habit formation and giving staff a voice to express safety concerns or ideas for improvement.”

USA Health also created a serious safety event review committee to provide tools to objectively review cases for patient harm. “Sharing lessons learned from these cases allows us to learn from other peoples’ stories. We remember the stories, not the statistics,” Pomrenke said. “Reading about what happened to someone else can allow us to say, ‘That could have been me. If I am ever in a similar situation, I can use that information to help guide me through, creating a positive outcome.’”

Other winners of the award include Catholic Health, ECU Health, Sharp Healthcare, Texas Health Resources, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Novant Health and Penn State Hershey Medical Center.

Press Ganey is a healthcare consulting firm with more than 41,000 clients worldwide.