AMSURG surgery centers are leading the way in creating a culture of safety. In honor of National Safety Month in June, AMSURG centers in various specialties answered the question: "How do you create a culture of safety in your center?"
The Center Leaders highlighted opportunities for strategic communication about patients, processes and procedures, including during staff meetings and timeouts. They provided ideas for enlisting staff members to be engaged in patient safety and for sustaining that engagement day in and day out.
Center Leaders are encouraging staff to view themselves as patient advocates and to speak up if they are concerned about a patient safety issue. Ideas were submitted via AMSURG's secure communications portal, Center Connect. The portal provides AMSURG Center Leaders and their staff with best practice performance improvement modules, financial reports and operational benchmarking reports, quality assurance performance improvement (QAPI) reports and opportunities to learn what other AMSURG centers are doing in their efforts to become centers of choice for physicians and patients.
Some of the best practices that were offered include:
- Discussing patient safety in each staff meeting
- Patients always being escorted to their family members or to their car
- Fully engaged participation in timeouts
- Encouraging nurses to speak up about concerns
- Having staff participate in creation of patient safety posters
- Including verbal reminders during patient hand-offs
This initiative to gather best practices from centers is one example of AMSURG's collaborative culture, illustrating the value the company places on the ideas and strategies its centers are putting to the test and the need to share those proven strategies between all centers.