Partnerships in Implementing Patient Safety (PIPS)

Introduction

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) offers 17 toolkits to implement patient safety changes to help make health care safer for patients. These toolkits have solutions for addressing the challenges that occur in hospitals and outpatient facilities during handoffs and discharges, in day-to-day work processes, while reconciling medications, and more.

The toolkits contain evidenced-based resources to assist:

• Hospitals that want to improve performance around some of their most common and serious patient safety problems.
• Emergency departments that want to improve patient flow and reduce the number of patients who leave without treatment, implement a simulation-based safety curriculum, and draw on the expertise of an emergency department pharmacist to improve medication safety.
• Hospital care units that are working to employ safe practices.
• Outpatient facility settings that are addressing medication safety.
• Patients who wish to learn more about medication safety and their post-hospital care.

Select for a list of toolkits by setting and user, by patient safety issue/area, and by Joint Commission National Patient Safety Goal.

Select for a program brief on the toolkits.

Projects

(Listed in order of most recently released AHRQ tool)

Testing the Re-Engineered Hospital Discharge
Preventing Venous Thromboembolisms in the Hospital
Interactive Venous Thromboembolism Safety Toolkit for Providers and Patients
Improving Warfarin Management
Improving Medication Safety in Clinics for Patients 55 and Older
Improving Patient Flow in the Emergency Department
The Emergency Department Pharmacist as a Safety Measure in Emergency Medicine
Reducing Central Line Bloodstream Infections and Ventilator-Associated Pneumonia
Improving Medication Adherence
Implementing Reduced Work Hours to Improve Patient Safety
Implementing a Program of Patient Safety in Small Rural Hospitals
Improving Hospital Discharge Through Medication Reconciliation and Education
Improving Patient Safety Through Enhanced Provider Communication
Patient Multidisciplinary Training for Medication Reconciliation
Reducing Discrepancies in Medication Histories and Orders at Handoffs
Using Military Simulation to Improve Rural Obstetric Safety
A Simulation-Based Safety Curriculum in a Children's Hospital Emergency Department

For Additional Information

For additional information on AHRQ-funded patient safety research and findings, please visit the AHRQ Web site at http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/, the PIPS grants and toolkits Web sites at http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/pips/, or contact:

Eileen Hogan, M.P.A.
Project Lead — Patient Safety
AHRQ Center for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety
540 Gaither Road
Rockville, MD 20850
Telephone: 301-427-1307
E-mail: Eileen.Hogan@ahrq.hhs.gov

Current as of August 2010

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Internet Citation:

Partnerships in Implementing Patient Safety (PIPS). August 2010. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville, MD. http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/pips.htm

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