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A $1.9 million grant from the Betty and Gordon Moore Foundation will fund a pilot program aimed at developing a collaborative, interdisciplinary patient safety model at three diverse hospitals: UCSF Medical Center, a leading academic institution; Kaiser Permanente-San Francisco, a leader in integrated care; and El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, a top community hospital.
Part of the 10-year, $110 million Betty Irene Moore Nursing Initiative to improve the quality of nursing-related care in the San Francisco Bay Area, this 18-month pilot program seeks to identify "best-practice" patient safety interventions that can be used in a variety of acute-care settings.
According to a 2000 report by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, as many as 98,000 people die in United States hospitals each year, not as a result of their illness or disease, but because of lapses in patient safety. The errors that compromise patient safety may be small—as seemingly minor as a typo on a surgical schedule or a reversed X-ray—but they can have disastrous effects. Most of these errors, the Institute of Medicine report emphasizes, are caused not by individual negligence or misconduct, but by failures in the system.
UCSF School of Medicine Professor Robert Wachter, MD, co-director of the program and author of Internal Bleeding: The Truth Behind America's Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes, explains that collaboration is the key to minimizing errors in care.
"We have finally come to realize that smart, committed health-care professionals can still cause harm absent an environment that prizes safety, systems that catch errors before they cause harm, and a culture of collaboration," he says. "This grant gives us the chance to create just that kind of environment and to learn from the shared experiences of three different types of hospitals."
The pilot program—co-directed by Wachter; Kathy Dracup, RN, FNP, DNSc, FAAN, dean of the UCSF School of Nursing; and Mary Anne Koda-Kimble, PharmD, dean of the UCSF School of Pharmacy—will promote collaboration and communication among physicians, nurses, and pharmacists at each of the three hospitals through teamwork training, patient engagement, executive "walk rounds," multidisciplinary conferences, and establishing goals for patient care.
Once these interventions have been tested at the three hospitals, the program directors hope to use them as the basis for recommendations to hospitals throughout the Bay Area.
"Every hospital can become safer," Dracup asserts. "But improved safety requires not just harder work and more awareness on the part of individuals. It requires a model for cooperation and teamwork among hospitals and health-care professionals."
To learn more about giving to the UCSF School of Nursing, contact Mark Boone at 415/502-8310 or mboone@support.ucsf.edu.
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