Every patient. Every day.

It's been four years since I wrote about the spectacular (yes, spectacular) work being done by the hospitals in Ohio, where the slogan was, "We compete on everything, but we don't compete on safety."  In particular, the pediatric hospitals were setting the standard with a collaboration called Ohio Children’s Hospitals’ Solutions for Patient Safety.

I just received an update on their efforts, and, again, the only appropriate word is "Bravo!"  The themes that continue to be reinforced are collaboration, high reliability concepts and quality improvement science methods, transparency, and modesty.  Note to policy-makers, this is not occurring because of government regulation:  It is happening because the clinical, administrative, and governance leaders in these organizations want to make it happen.

A colleague writes:

We’ve dropped the “Ohio” to better reflect the national scope of our work. We’re still keeping “Ohio Children’s Hospitals’ Solutions for Patient Safety” for the Ohio-specific work that the 8 original Ohio-based hospitals are doing, but the national work on preventing HACs and creating a “culture of safety” at pediatric institutions across the nation will now be done under the SPS banner.

Here's the description from their website:

We are a network of 78 children’s hospitals across the United States who share the vision that no child will ever experience serious harm while we are trying to heal them.

We believe that by putting aside competition and sharing our safety successes and failures, we can achieve our goals faster.

We all learn from and all teach each other to ensure every child is safe in our care, every day.

Please check out the recently issued annual briefing, which outlines their accomplishments during the past year and briefly explains where they're heading in 2014.