Implementation Science and Research
30/30 Education Session - 30 minutes
Julia Sammons, MD, MSCE
Medical Director, Infection Prevention and Control
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Nothing to disclose
Kathleen Gase, MBA, MPH, CIC, FAPIC
Director Patient Safety & Quality
Barnes-Jewish St. Peters & Progress West Hospitals
St. Peters, Missouri
Nothing to disclose
Preventing HAIs and healthcare-associated conditions in a quaternary, pediatric academic medical center requires a streamlined and comprehensive strategy. This session will cover how one pediatric academic medical center used data to prevent HAIs across their system.
Participants will explore the steps undertaken by this facility to create a Harm Prevention Program, including:
• An assessment of the challenges in the existing harm prevention work, including inconsistent communications, ill-defined roles and responsibilities, under-optimized data infrastructure, and highly variable organizational and local engagement.
• A comprehensive Harm Prevention Program launch focused on nine key harm indicators, including five HAIs.
• Developing a structure that leveraged both a macro- and microsystem perspective to influence engagement at both an enterprise and unit level.
• Tactical interventions such as streamlining communications from the board to bedside; clarifying roles and responsibilities and optimizing resources where necessary; embedding high reliability principles through minimizing variation, preoccupation with failure, and deference to expertise; and optimizing data infrastructure to support real-time standardized data displays that enable targeted improvement at both the enterprise and unit levels.
Overall, this work resulted in statistically significant reductions in rate of harm in five of the nine key harm indicators since the program’s inception and a reduction in overall rate of harm (harm index) by nearly 10%. By targeting a prioritized set of interventions across the continuum from macro- to microsystems, the Harm Prevention Program implemented the structure necessary to drive culture change and improve outcomes for patients. This session will help participants understand how to translate this program in their own facility to reduce preventable harm.