Our Organizational Commitment to Safety and Quality Improvement
| Hopkins Medicine has built an infrastructure that keeps safety and quality improvement at the forefront of our caregivers’ minds. |
- Leadership Rounds: Because improvement requires support from all levels of an organization, our units’ safety initiatives get “adopted” by senior Hopkins leaders, all the way up to Dean/CEO Edward Miller and University President Bill Brody. On their regular executive safety rounds, leaders meet with frontline staff and managers, learn about their health care improvement efforts and the hurdles they face, and offer top-level support when needed.
- Board of Trustees Quality Improvement Committee: Our trustees’ duties extend beyond financial oversight. Members of this committee help Hopkins Medicine to set priorities for patient safety and ensure that they’re accomplished.
- Quality Improvement Council: This Johns Hopkins Hospital committee, which reports directly to The Johns Hopkins Hospital Board of Trustees, oversees the work of a multitude of other groups, including patient safety, service quality improvement, clinical quality improvement and regulatory compliance.
- Patient Safety Committee: Hopkins Hospital’s Patient Safety Committee sets annual goals for safety initiatives, meets monthly to monitor progress on them, and works to communicate lessons with caregivers.
Safety Leaders: Hopkins Medicine has several staff members devoted full time to keeping error-free care in focus. Hopkins Hospital’s patient safety manager coordinates and oversees patient safety initiatives. (See related story.) We also have a perioperative safety officer who works within the Department of Surgery to help build teamwork, investigate adverse events, and run simulation exercises. Obstetrics has a perinatal safety nurse with similar duties.
- Smaller Safety Teams: We have many standing and ad-hoc teams that work to address safety issues on a unit or department level, or to address issues that transcend departments, such as the use of central catheters.
- Center for Innovation in Quality Patient Care: The Center was created in 2002 to facilitate patient-centered revamping of health care delivery systems in Johns Hopkins Medicine. The Center’s experts help interdisciplinary teams throughout Hopkins’ medical institutions to develop more efficient, less error-prone processes.
- Johns Hopkins University Quality and Safety Research Group: This team, whose members have expertise in medicine, nursing, public health, psychology and other fields, uses Hopkins Hospital as the learning lab to test and refine interventions and evaluation tools. The group has developed scientifically valid, feasible tools, such as checklists for preventing bloodstream infections, to improve quality of care and patient safety that are being used by hundreds of hospitals.
