Hospitals Are Leading the Way to Advance Patient Safety

Patient safety and top-notch patient care have always been the twin guide stars of our field.

Hospitals and health systems have led the way in making bold changes to drive improvement in outcomes for decades, and we know that the dramatic improvements we have seen since the landmark 1999 Institute of Medicine report are a direct result of that leadership.

But hospitals and health systems are continually striving to raise the bar on patient safety. As innovative medicines and technologies bring new hope to the patients and communities we serve, the hospital field is relentlessly assessing, reassessing and improving our approaches to maximize the safety of care.

To support and advance those efforts, the AHA recently launched a new Patient Safety Initiative that seeks to energize all the work already underway and reaffirm hospital and health system leadership and commitment to patient safety.

Through the initiative we seek to:

• Provide hospitals with tools and data to advance patient safety;
• Give hospitals a platform and resources to tell their improvement stories;
• Highlight and resource successful local innovations to national scale; and
• Inform public policy discussions about the most effective policy steps to support, spread and sustain safety improvement.

With significant input from patient safety leaders at hospitals and health systems and other groups, the initiative will center on three foundational elements of patient safety improvement:

• Culture of Safety from board to bedside, fostering board and senior leadership strategies to continually support safer care delivery.
• Health Equity focuses on ensuring all patients receive safe care regardless of their race/ethnicity, gender, preferred language and health-related social needs.
• Workforce Safety focuses on helping ensure that health care’s most vital resource — the workforce — practices in a safe environment that supports their physical and emotional well-being.

This hospital- and health system-driven initiative will help hospitals further their commitment to advancing their work on these three topics. Starting early next year, we’ll begin new collaboratives that will share strategies and resources to support hospitals in addressing these three important areas.

At the same time, we are working closely with data partners to explore how to share more real-time, nationally aggregated insights into the continuous improvement in patient safety outcomes we are seeing across the country.

As our health care system continues to evolve, one thing remains steadfast for America’s hospitals and health systems: We are committed to providing patients with safe, high-quality, effective, equitable and person-centered care.

Please visit our webpage to learn more about these efforts and how to participate. We’ll continue to share tools that help build a culture of patient safety; best practices in care delivery and other critical safety topics; and strategies so that hospitals can learn from each other’s experiences in improving safety.