Making Care Safer
As the Partnership for Patients grows, there will be more and more ways to get involved to make care safer for all patients. Check in with this page frequently to find out about new opportunities.
- Preparing Your Hospital for Success
- Eliminating All-Cause Harm
- Hospital Engagement Networkss
- Improving Care Transitions
- Learn about Our Areas of Focus
Preparing Your Hospital for Success
Improving patient safety is not easy. Health care providers are committed to providing high-quality care – that’s why they entered the field. They work hard, so finding time to learn new science, reorganize teams, and change routines can be challenging. Hospital leadership and staff can do a lot to prepare their organizations for a successful journey to improved care and safer patients. Here are some tools and guidance to help you begin.
Learn more about how to Prepare Your Hospital for Success
Eliminating All-Cause Harm
The Partnership for Patients is committed to addressing all forms of harm that can affect patients in hospitals. Hospitals, doctors, nurses, and other health care providers are working very hard to provide the best possible health care to their patients. And yet every provider knows that sometimes the system works against them, or they don’t have the support they need to make sure the best care happens every time, for every patient. Addressing all causes of harm means tackling safety and quality in every care setting and embedding a new ethos into the system and the culture of care. This is a big challenge but is central to achieving our shared goals.
Learn more about All-Cause Harm
Hospital Engagement Networks
The Partnership for Patients has set the ambitious goal to reduce hospital acquired conditions by 40% by 2013. Achievement of this goal will center around 26 Hospital Engagement Networks that will work to improve patient safety, reduce complications and preventable hospital readmissions, and save lives. To Hospital Engagement Networks will also work to develop learning collaboratives for hospitals and provide a wide array of initiatives and activities to improve patient safety. They will be required to conduct intensive training programs to teach and support hospitals in making patient care safer, provide technical assistance to hospitals so that hospitals can achieve quality measurement goals, and establish and implement a system to track and monitor hospital progress in meeting quality improvement goals.
The 26 Hospital Engagement Networks are:
- American Hospital Association
- Ascension Health
- Carolinas HealthCare System
- Catholic Healthcare West
- Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council Foundation
- Georgia Hospital Association Research and Education Foundation
- Healthcare Association of New York State
- Hospital & Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania
- Intermountain Healthcare
- Iowa Healthcare Collaborative
- Joint Commission Resources, Inc.
- Lifepoint Hospitals, Inc.
- Michigan Health & Hospital Association
- Minnesota Hospital Association
- National Public Health and Hospital Institute
- New Jersey Hospital Association;
- Nevada Hospital Association
- North Carolina Hospital Association
- Ohio Children’s Hospital Solutions for Patient Safety
- Ohio Hospital Association
- Premier
- Tennessee Hospital Association
- Texas Center for Quality & Patient Safety
- UHC
- VHA
- Washington State Hospital Association
Learn more about the Hospital Engagement Networks.
Improving Care Transitions
The Partnership for Patients has set the ambitious goal to reduce hospital readmissions by 20% by 2013. Achievement of this goal will center on reducing complications during transitions from one care setting to another, particularly for patients with multiple chronic conditions. Seamless care transitions require thoughtful collaboration among hospitals, community-based organizations, patient caregivers, and patients themselves. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced the opportunity to apply for the Medicare Community-based Care Transitions Program, which was authorized by Section 3026 of the Affordable Care Act.
Learn more about Care Transitions
Learn about Our Areas of Focus
The Partnership for Patients has identified nine areas of focus. The Partnership will not limit its work to these nine areas, and will pursue the reduction of all-cause harm. But the following areas of focus are obvious and important places to begin.
- Adverse Drug Events (ADE)
- Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infections (CAUTI)
- Central Line Associated Blood Stream Infections (CLABSI)
- Injuries from Falls and Immobility
- Obstetrical Adverse Events
- Pressure Ulcers
- Surgical Site Infections
- Venous Thromboembolism (VTE)
- Ventilator-Associated Pneumonia (VAP)
- Other Hospital-Acquired Conditions
Posted on: April 12, 2011
Last updated: December 14, 2011