Chair File: Hospitals’ Unwavering Commitment to Ensure Patient Safety

September 17 is World Patient Safety Day. It’s an opportunity to spotlight the importance of ensuring all patients receive safe, quality care in all health care settings.

Patient safety is always the top priority at hospitals and health systems every day. Physicians, nurses, environmental services team members, pharmacists, therapists, lab technicians, C-suite executives and board members — everyone working in a hospital keeps safety top of mind 24/7/365.

The AHA last year launched the Patient Safety Initiative to reaffirm hospital and health system leadership and commitment to patient safety. This initiative provides hospitals with tools and data to advance patient safety, offers a platform for sharing stories of improvement with peers, and highlights examples of innovation that support, spread and sustain safety improvement.

A new report released by the AHA using data analyzed by Vizient shows that hospital performance on key safety and quality measures was better in the first quarter of 2024 than it was right before the COVID-19 pandemic, and that hospitals made these improvements while caring for more complex patients with significantly more health care needs.

Key takeaways from the report include:

• Despite being sicker and having more complex conditions, hospitalized patients in the first quarter of 2024 were on average over 20% more likely to survive, given the severity of their illnesses, compared to the fourth quarter of 2019.
• Using national hospitalization data and Vizient's analysis, the AHA projects that while caring for sicker patients, hospitals’ efforts to improve safety led to 200,000 Americans hospitalized between April 2023 and March 2024 surviving episodes of care they wouldn’t have in 2019.
• Central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI) and catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI) have decreased while preventive screening for certain types of cancers has increased.

Each and every hospital across the country is working on efforts to improve the patient experience and quality of care for the individuals and communities they serve.

At Dartmouth Health, the health system I lead, we are advancing patient safety through shared learning via our participation in AHA’s Patient Safety Initiative and as a national Patient Safety Organization. All of our clinical sites join a systemwide safety huddle three times a week. In addition, our Patient Safety Training Center  provides services and facilities for multidisciplinary experiential learning. At the center, health care professionals acquire technical proficiency, knowledge, confidence, attitudes and team skills to continue the journey to safer practice and excellence in patient care.

To see inspiring videos and stories of some of the innovative efforts hospitals are engaging in, visit AHA’s Quest for Quality webpage and Telling the Hospital Story webpage. The AHA will continue to highlight these stories, and we encourage your hospital to share your efforts advancing quality with your communities.  

We should be proud of hospitals’ and health systems’ performance on the patient safety measures included in the AHA report. But we know there is more work to do. We will continue that work to advance health across the country.