Patient Safety

By Nancy Bassett, RN

As Chair of Quality Review, my goal for the next year is ZERO errors causing patient harm.

Traditional tracking of these incidents has resulted in percentile ranking by state and national organizations to determine how each hospital ranks with others across the country. My Quality Committee, working with these organizations, will now begin emphasizing actual numbers of occurrences in addition to these percentiles. Our emphasis is on each occurrence of each error, how they happened, and what we can do to prevent them from happening again.

As a staff RN, a Unit Director, a Board member, and as a patient myself, my experience and education allow me the insight and the determination to pursue excellence in the patient experience and to drastically reduce or eliminate those errors that cause patients additional suffering and a longer hospital stay.