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Patient Care Quality and Safety Initiatives

NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital is dedicated to providing our patients and their families with a safe, reliable environment of care and service each and every day and is committed to adopting and implementing the National Patient Safety Goals. These goals were developed by quality and safety experts based on real events that caused patient harm or death in hospitals across the country, and set forth to promote specific improvements in patient safety.

Patient Safety Fridays

Launched in January 2008, this Hospital-wide initiative is a major step forward toward creating a culture of safety throughout NewYork-Presbyterian, and maintaining a continuous state of preparedness for every patient as the Hospital achieves its goal of becoming a high-reliability organization. Every Friday, senior leadership, department heads, and key personnel at the Hospital's five sites gather simultaneously to present a structured curriculum around various issues in quality and safety -- some clinical, some environmental.

At the end of the hour-long presentation, teams of two or three staff members work with staff one-on-one on the units doing tracers -- focused interviews in which staff discuss the topics presented and identify issues in concert with Patient Care Directors that need to be addressed either at a unit level or at a Hospital-wide level. The rounds provide a method at the unit level to bring Hospital leadership together with front line staff so that open discussions about the issues that affect patient safety, such as communication, hand hygiene, fire safety, medication reconciliation, patient identification, and equipment, can occur. In working toward the development of a culture of patient safety, staff are encouraged to participate in identifying factors that may have contributed to incidents or near misses, how staff have intervened to prevent patient harm, and what staff are concerned about.

A weekly conference call takes place with patient safety leaders to review what has arisen in safety rounds throughout NewYork-Presbyterian and determine which issues should be handled at the unit level or whether they need to be brought up at quality and patient safety level. Patient Safety Fridays, with its regular schedule of safety rounds, has fostered an extraordinary collaboration among nursing staff, medical staff, the pharmacy, administration, and virtually every Hospital entity with a common goal of advancing an environment of quality and patient safety across all of the Hospital's campuses.

Service Excellence: Patient Satisfaction

Patient satisfaction is a priority focus for the Department of Nursing. Nursing care indicators (Press Ganey) for patient satisfaction include:

• Overall patient satisfaction with nursing care
• Friendliness of the Registered Nurse
• Prompt response to call bell
• Registered Nurse's attitude toward requests
• Attention to special/personal needs
• Registered Nurse kept patient informed
• Skill of the Registered Nurse
• Pain management

Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital has implemented family-centered care seeking to improve patient satisfaction through involvement of the family in key decisions on the delivery of patient care. Family members are involved in Hospital committees aimed at improving care and the child and family experience and have verbalized their appreciation at being involved in such efforts.