Collectively, Patient Care Services (PCS) promotes and exhibits excellence in service and quality for patients and families at Tufts Medical Center. Our teamwork, initiative and contributions affect the care of our patients and their families; quality is a measure of how much we care.
Quality is a crucial part of our jobs. We must improve our skills and techniques to ensure we provide exceptional care with exemplary outcomes. Quality is reinforcing best practices until they are ingrained. Quality is taking what we know about best practice and looking for ways to make that practice even better. At Tufts Medical Center, we expect to achieve excellent patient outcomes and exceed national quality benchmarks.
We place patients first through a standardized, transparent assessment of our performance, using evidence-based best practice and dashboards to monitor our results. Our nursing dashboard went live in 2011. This tool displays nursing-relevant data in the areas of clinical care outcomes, patient safety and satisfaction metrics, went live in 2011.
Karen Reed, CPHQ, joined the PCS team as Director of Clinical Care Improvement and became Director of Quality and Patient Safety for the entire organization in late 2011. Karen’s leadership helped to secure risk management grants to ensure we are operating at the highest quality and safety levels possible.
One of those grants allowed Surgical Services to start the Culture of Safety initiative. All surgeons, residents and perioperative staff completed a safety attitude questionnaire. A nationally recognized leader in patient safety and high reliability Alan Frankel, MD began training staff in early 2012. A second grant brought the Institute of Safe Medication Practices on-site in late November to assess the pediatric medication process and provide insight and recommendations to continue reducing the risk of medication error throughout all units and departments that treat children.
The graphs depict our performance in house-wide quality and safety initiatives on central line-associated blood stream infection (claBSI), urinary tract infection (UTI), falls, pressure ulcers and pain reassessment.
