Quality Assurance

Safety, Reliability, and Accountability

Quality Assurance Domain Function: Prevent and triage safety events. Identify and address gaps in care systematically. These goals are accomplished by: implementing guidelines and best practices, performing root cause analyses and identifying why safety events occur with established tools, developing risk reduction strategies (RRS) with hospital QPS support, and performing RRS audits after implementation.

Facilitated by:

  • Core Anesthesiology QPS Team
  • Department Chair, Executive Vice Chair
  • Quality Assurance (QA) Committee

Our Approach to Quality Assurance

We are building upon our department’s longstanding commitment to patient safety, established by the Dr. Steve Mercer and Mary Clark NP, by:

  • Encouraging staff to raise safety concerns and cultivate a psychologically safe work environment
  • Continuing to partner with the hospital in timely and thoughtful triaging of events with the Keepsafe reporting system
  • Leveraging the content experts from across our clinical divisions who comprise our QA committee
  • Applying appropriate tools to understand why safety events happen, including 5 Whys, Causal Event Trees, CAST, Root Cause Analyses, and others
  • Developing risk reduction strategies with the greatest anticipated impact using the established hierarchy of interventions and striving to create solutions with force functions, automations, and fail-safes
  • Follow-through and accountability tracking to ensure corrective actions are completed and sustained
  • Collaborating with the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation to ensure that we are at the cutting edge of standards in perioperative quality
  • Participating as a lead department in the NYP Culture of Safety Initiative, emphasizing improved debriefing and staff support, blame-avoidance, and closed-loop communication with front line teams using event analysis summaries
ahrq

AHRQ, https://www.ahrq.gov/sops/about/patient-safety-culture.html

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