National quality program achieves improvements in safety culture and reduction in preventable harms in community hospitals.

Frush K, Chamness C, Olson B, et al. Jt Comm J Qual Patient Saf. 2018 Jun 5; [Epub ahead of print].

Improving safety culture is an organizational challenge. This quality improvement study describes a partnership in which a large privately owned group of hospitals, postacute facilities, and outpatient clinics partnered with an academic health system to enhance safety culture and metrics. The program included an assessment of the quality at each site followed by an individual improvement plan. Each site embarked on a multimodal intervention that included leadership engagement, team training, audit and feedback, and traditional quality improvement strategies such as Plan–Do–Study–Act cycles. The authors report significant improvements across measures of patient safety such as health care–associated infections and readmissions.

Available at