A Culture of “Our” Patient
This week, I have invited our Surgeon-in-Chief and Medical Director Dr. Albert to join me in talking about a topic that is extremely important to everyone at HSS – our culture of safety.
Over the past few years we have been working to improve upon our culture of safety, and we have enlisted the help of LifeWings. We’ve talked about this organization in the past, but as a reminder, LifeWings is a team of physicians, astronauts, nurses and pilots that has helped more than 150 healthcare organizations implement the best safety practices from aviation and other high reliability industries.
Through our work with LifeWings, we have developed the HSS Team Training (HTT) initiative. This hospital-wide program has the goal of helping us to improve upon our teamwork, communication and coordination skills. Here are a few of the things we have accomplished over the past year as part of this program:
- LifeWings trained more than 1,100 perioperative and procedural area leaders, physicians and team members in teamwork and communication skills.
- They also certified four members of the perioperative team as Master Trainers who can now carry on the HTT training program here at HSS.
- We completed a three-day Safety Tools Workshop where frontline physicians and staff worked together to update our current time out process, as well as create a new debrief tool.
- We upgraded the RL adverse event reporting system to encourage people to report near-miss and actual safety events.
- Updated tools created by frontline physicians and team members have already gone live in our ORs and will soon go live in our procedural areas.
The ultimate goal in all of this is to get to zero patient harm, as outlined in the Roadmap to Excellence we created.
The only way we will do this is by continuing to move toward a culture of “our” patient, and a culture where all HSS family members feel comfortable speaking up knowing leadership believes in this and will support you. This is why we both felt it was so important to embark on this journey with LifeWings.
We pride ourselves on being the best in the world at what we do, and because of that, we have a responsibility to always strive to do even better. LifeWings shares our drive, our culture of excellence and our focus on leadership across all levels of an organization. Working with them to help further improve upon our culture of safety was an easy decision for us to make, and one we are already seeing the benefits of.
Remember, we are all leaders of HSS, regardless of our role, and patient safety is an area where we all need to take a strong leadership position. Thank you for always doing your best to keep our patients safe, and thank you for everything you will continue to do moving forward to support this initiative.
3 Responses to “A Culture of “Our” Patient”
When the #1 institution in the world decides that we can still strive to be even better, it inspires us all to be the best versions of ourselves. Implementing HTT here at HSS is a game changer. It allows us to take our personalities out of the decision making process when we treat our patients and gives us “all” the opportunity to provide care with proven standards of safety. HTT makes champions of us all as we push towards a unified goal of ” ZERO PATIENT HARM”. It is my pleasure to be a part of this evolving culture here at HSS and it is in my belief that only continued greatness and amazing care for our communities will come from moving toward the future of medicine. BRAVO!
Sounds like you are hitting a homerun with this outstanding program! Anything that improves awareness, fosters accountability and puts patients first seems like a best-practice to me. The recruitment team is committed to identifying candidates who will embrace and advance the concept of “ZERO PATIENT HARM”.
Thank you for sharing this important information with us. Since we have started the lifeWings culture of safety initiative, many team members were empowered to speak up on the patient’s behalf. It is only by a culture of togetherness that we will continue to move forward as one.