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If you’re reading this, you’re keenly aware that patient safety requires effort 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year. You may also be aware that despite our efforts, 71,000 patients die each year because of falls and pressure injuries that occur in U.S. hospitals. That number should really stop you in your tracks.
Hospitals and health systems have been working for decades to minimize these events, and increasing impetus for doing so comes from a host of sources. For many of you, those sources may include accreditation requirements, Magnet designation or redesignation, reimbursement from CMS and other payors, and the availability of patient safety ratings. Those are all important reasons to ask staff to keep patient safety at the top of their growing list of priorities, but there’s another reason that just might get more traction with your employees – their patients.
It’s easy to get bogged down in the regulatory and financial case for patient safety, among other competing priorities, and lose sight of patients’ health as the most important reason to continue this work. And let’s be real, it is exhausting work. Patient safety is a marathon…with no finish line. Awareness initiatives like Falls Prevention Awareness Week (spearheaded by the National Council on Aging and happening September 21-26 this year) bring opportunities to engage staff at all levels in remaining steadfast in their patient safety efforts. This year, my team at HD Nursing is pleased to share a toolkit to help you leverage Falls Prevention Awareness Week to re-energize healthcare staff at all levels by focusing on patients as the reason for the consistent effort. We hope our Save71K Challenge will tug at your staff’s heartstrings and motivate them to live out the mission of patient safety in their daily actions.
The Save71K Challenge was named in honor and memory of the 71,000 patients who perish after experiencing a fall or pressure injury in our care. Our aim is for at least 71,000 healthcare workers to reaffirm their commitment to patient safety. Implementing the 71K Challenge is as simple as you want it to be.
At the core of the Challenge is a healthcare worker taking an action to symbolize their renewed commitment to patient safety. Actively committing to a behavior is associated with increased likelihood of carrying out that action, and this effect may be even stronger with a public commitment. The Save71K Challenge Toolkit offers you several ideas to solicit your team members’ commitment. You can simply share the QR code in team meetings and ask everyone to scan with their phones and click a button. You can blow up a giant visual with empty dots and ask staff to color a dot to represent a life they could save by practicing patient safety. You can ask staff to write down their patient safety “why” and then post those short stories in a place accessible by other staff. These are just a few of the resources and ideas in the Save71K Challenge Toolkit.
We designed these resources to be relevant to all staff. While nurses often lead the work of patient safety, every member of your team can play a role. Providers, for example, are frequently exposed to business metrics and star ratings as key rationales for safety initiatives, but altruism may have been the driver for their career choices. Several types of unlicensed staff (e.g., techs, dietary, environmental, transport) enter patient rooms frequently and can observe safety practices (e.g. whether a patient’s belongings are in reach or a bed alarm is turned on) and correct or report concerns. Materials in the Save71K toolkit, such as videos of individuals sharing personal stories of the impact of falls, can motivate any employee to work at the top of their scope to protect the patients they care for.
The Save71K Toolkit is yours for the asking. I hope you will request a toolkit and use the materials to give your staff a needed boost this Patient Safety Awareness Week. I’ll go a step further and make the same offer to you that I made to our clients across the country – if you have an idea for a resource that we should consider adding to the toolkit, let us know (message us at [email protected]), and we will do our best to make that happen for you.
Thanks for your leadership in patient safety. We hope this is a meaningful and helpful resource for you and your team as you keep your patient safety game strong.
