Aiming for Zero

Following up on the piece referred to below written by Doug Hanto about preventable harm, please see this lovely article in a new magazine called Pediatrics Nationwide, published by Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

Author Kelli Burton starts with this dramatic moment:

In October 2008, Richard Brilli, MD, stood in a silent conference room, waiting for his audience to digest the news he’d just delivered: hundreds of significant harm events are identified each year at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, and nearly every one of them could be prevented.

The group before him, the institution’s board of directors, knew that incidents of preventable patient harm are an unfortunate reality in the health care industry. But hearing the numbers aloud made the reality all the more real.

Then, what happened?

As the chief medical officer at Nationwide Children’s, Dr. Brilli felt strongly that the problem couldn’t be addressed on a national scale until individual institutions tackled the problems from within. So in 2008, he found himself convincing the board of directors that just reducing the number of serious harm events wasn’t enough. The goal, he argued, had to be eliminating them altogether.

[N]early 9,000 employees underwent comprehensive safety training. In 2011, Nationwide Children’s became the first pediatric institution in the country to make its serious safety event statistics public.

“Health care outcomes are only going to improve if everyone is willing to change long-standing habits and do that consistently, and being transparent is an important part of that,” Dr. Brilli says.