Daily Dose of Patient Safety #1: Leadership [HTML]

MHS Patient Safety Professionals:

Welcome to Patient Safety Awareness Week (PSAW) 2018! 

Each morning this week, we will share simple tips, tools and tactics to help health care professionals and patients alike to be “United for Patient Safety.”

Today’s tip is about leadership.

According to The Joint Commission, leadership's failure to create an effective safety culture is a contributing factor to many types of adverse events from wrong site surgery to delays in treatment. Engaged and committed leaders are the drivers behind culture change, fostering staff trust and implementing better processes that results in zero preventable patient harm.

Military health care leaders span all levels of care delivery. Front line health care professionals, patient safety professionals and commanders have unique responsibilities:

• Identifying and addressing gaps in their safety culture,
• Engaging key influencers for change,
• Setting goals for targeted improvement,
• Implementing proven safe practices, and
• Modeling and reinforcing key behaviors to ensure high-reliability performance for improvement.

The Military Health System Leadership Engagement Toolkit provides actionable information to leaders to improve teamwork and foster a culture of safety, such as daily safety briefings. It is a leader’s responsibility to conduct daily safety leadership rounds and ensure huddles, briefs and debriefs are being held as needed.

We’re confident you’ll find this tool helpful. One MTF staff member told us the LET is “Very well done – thorough – deep and practical.” Download your copy of the LET and let us know what you think! 

Additionally, if you haven’t been to our Patient Safety Learning Center recently, head on over and check out our new Leadership page that centralizes tools to support the critical leadership role in achieving zero patient harm and high reliability.

If you don’t have an account for the PSLC, please go here to learn how to get in today!

Are you a patient safety champion? Test your patient safety IQ with our Daily Patient Safety Quiz Challenge on Facebook. Questions will be posted Monday through Friday this week at 11 a.m. EDT on Facebook. Be the first to answer the question correctly for a little prize!

The IHI/NPSF complimentary webinar “Engaging Patients and Providers: Speaking Up for Patient Safety” is today from 1-2 p.m. EDT. See our calendar of events for more information.

MHS staff, don’t forget to register for the Joint VA/DoD PSAW Webinar series and the DoD PSP webinar happening this week. See our calendar of events for more information.

Do you work in an MTF? Share with us how you’re celebrating Patient Safety Awareness Week at DHA.patientsafety@mail.mil.

If you have questions, please e-mail us at DHA.patientsafety@mail.mil.

Thank you,

DoD Patient Safety Program Team