Healthcare professionals work together to reduce hospital-acquired infections

The Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR) and New York City's Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC) teamed up for their third annual Patient Safety Conference on October 7, 2010. Building on the success of their first two events, they were joined this year by union leaders representing support staff and PAs (DC37, AFSCME), attendings (Doctors Council), Environmental Services staff (DC37) and LPNs (1199SEIU) for the one-day conference at Bellevue Hospital.

The conference, Improving Patient Safety and Reducing Infections through Effective Teamwork and Communication, brought together over 225 hospital employees from HHC’s eleven hospitals, representing all levels of front line staff.

The keynote speaker, nationally renowned patient safety expert Dr. Richard Shannon from the University of Pennsylvania, galvanized the crowd with his frank assessment, “The only number that matters [regarding hospital-acquired infections] is ZERO.” Dr. Shannon stressed that all members of the healthcare team, from nurses and physicians to ward clerks and housekeepers, need to be involved in improving patient safety because all have valuable contributions to make to that effort. In keeping with that belief, conference organizers invited representative members of an inpatient unit (medical or surgical) from each HHC hospital to attend, along with those hospitals’ administrative staff, e.g. the chief operating officer, medical and nursing directors, and patient safety officer.

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Focus on teamwork and communication at patient safety conference

Dr. David Feldman of Maimonides Medical Center leads participants through teamwork exercises.Poor communication not only creates interpersonal problems between staff in different hospital departments, it can also lead to poor patient care.

This was the message driving a one-day conference organized jointly by The Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR) and New York City's Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC) on April 21, 2009 at Metropolitan Hospital in East Harlem. 

Learning to work as a team and developing a culture of mutual respect are at the heart of good communication, said Mary Salisbury, RN, one of the presenters at the conference. The multi-specialty, multi-disciplinary event attracted 170 participants from eleven HHC teaching hospitals, including more than 80 residents and attendings, and representatives from every level of hospital administration and staff.

CIR & HHC host conference on improving patient hand-overs

New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC) and The Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR) joined forces on February 6, 2008 to host a first-ever conference on improving the transfer of patient information (also known as hand-overs). More than 100 conference participants took part—residents, residency and medical directors, nursing, IT and patient safety administrators—from HHC's eleven teaching hospitals.

Nationally recognized experts in the field of patient hand-overs addressed the conference. Dr. Christopher Landrigan, Sleep and Patient Safety Director at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, presented data on how to optimize teamwork and safety. Medical errors usually occur because of a series of small failures, none of which are caught, Dr. Landrigan explained. Research shows that adverse events can best be avoided by improving systems. Standardized and computerized sign-out systems can substantially decrease the number of medical errors, and a checklist, much like a pilot uses before takeoff, helps to ensure that all the necessary information is recorded and available to the entire team.

Dr. Edward Dunn, Director of Policy and Clinical Affairs at the VA National Center for Patient Safety, presented on principles of safe transitions involving communication and teamwork culled from clinical experience.

HHC is perfectly poised to take advantage of new developments in the field and make changes in the way things are done because of its commitment to "being #1 in patient safety among all the nation's public hospital systems," said Alan Aviles, Esq., HHC's president. In connection with that goal, Mr. Aviles has committed HHC to transparency, going so far as to post mortality figures on its website so the public can make informed decisions.