As part of Stony Brook Medicine’s commitment to patient safety and quality, improving the culture of safety to prevent or reduce errors is of paramount importance to provide safe, quality care for our patients. It is also essential to maintain Stony Brook University Hospital’s (SBUH) Healthgrades designation as one of “America’s 100 Best Hospitals™” for 2019 for providing the highest quality of care.
I would like to thank everyone who participated in our recent Culture of Safety survey. Your opinions, comments, and suggestions regarding patient safety within your unit/department, and throughout the hospital, are vital to formulating and executing initiatives to advance Stony Brook’s culture of safety.
For this year’s survey, which was conducted in May, we achieved the highest response rate since we began administering the survey – 61 percent! SBUH also garnered the highest number of survey respondents for any healthcare facility in New York State. The participation rate is an important metric for safety culture and engagement as higher participation rates determine the confidence with which we believe the survey results truly reflect the opinions of our staff. The response rate reveals that a large percentage of our staff want to engage in a conversation about the factors which drive safety.
The survey results also identifies areas of strength, as well as opportunities for improvement:
Areas of strength:
• Teamwork within units: Staff support each other, treat each other with respect, and work together as a team. This was one of our highest rated areas, with 72 percent favorable scores.
• Continuous Improvement: We are actively implementing changes to improve patient safety and evaluating the effectiveness of new initiatives.
• Supervisors: Expectations and actions promoting safety: Supervisors/managers consider staff suggestions for improving patient safety, commend staff for following patient safety procedures, and do not overlook patient safety problems.
Opportunities for improvement:
• Teamwork across units: There is an opportunity to further improve communication and cooperation among hospital units that need to work together.
• Response to error: Focus efforts to spread information regarding a just culture.
• Hand-offs and transitions: Enhance communication processes relating to patient care across hospital units and during shift changes.
• Staffing: Effectively communicate staffing plans.
This feedback is very important to us as the delivery of the survey results is not the end point in the survey process; it is just the beginning. Information gathered from the survey is used to implement changes to ensure a safe environment for patients. The survey results were recently shared with the leadership team, and will be cascaded to the entire organization, to solicit input for action plan development to address specific unit/department opportunities.
Previous survey feedback has led to the creation of Patient Safety First, the weekly safety education and assessment program involving hundreds of staff, and SB Safe, the blame-free system to report errors, good catches and other safety opportunities. The redesign of the employee intranet, ThePulse, which was launched in late August, is an example of how one of the suggestions from this year’s survey have been implemented.
Thank you for your contributions to improving Stony Brook Medicine’s patient safety culture by sharing your insights. Your voice matters and your opinion counts!
Carol