GNYHA’s Quality and Clinical Initiatives team recognized Patient Safety Awareness Week by highlighting its quality and patient safety programming and initiatives to help member efforts to promote and enhance the quality of care for all patients. All GNYHA performance improvement resources can be found on GNYHA’s website.
Maternal Health
GNYHA’s Maternal Health Learning Series is a forum to share Federal, State, and local government policy and fiscal initiatives to advance maternal health equity. Each session also highlights member programming about the maternal health care continuum to build interdisciplinary hospital-based infrastructure to advance equity in maternal health care, promote shared decision-making among patients and providers, and develop nontraditional, community-based partnerships. The first two forums can be viewed online here.
Patient Safety Culture Survey Initiative
GNYHA has partnered with almost 60 member hospitals since 2021 to administer the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Surveys on Patient Safety Culture™ Hospital Survey 2.0 (HSOPS 2.0) and has collected responses from nearly 45,000 staff members. The initiative includes HSOPS 2.0 and the Workplace Safety Supplemental Items that can be added to the standard HSOPS 2.0 survey. These surveys can help GNYHA members meet The Joint Commission’s (TJC) requirement that leadership evaluate culture of safety using valid, reliable tools. As part of the initiative, GNYHA provides in-depth reporting, including the ability to compare hospital results with national and GNYHA-member specific benchmarks. GNYHA’s action planning workshops help members analyze their survey data, make the data actionable, and build their action-planning infrastructure. Please contact Kendall LaSane for more information about the initiative.
Antibiotic Stewardship
Conversations about antibiotic stewardship programs (ASPs) have often centered on improving antibiotic stewardship as a public health goal to reduce antimicrobial resistance. This loses sight of the benefit of ASPs for individual patients at the point of care. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has antibiotic use and resistance (AUR) modules within the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) that can help ASPs monitor antimicrobial use and resistance and benchmark. In 2024, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Promoting Interoperability Program will require reporting into the NHSN AUR module. GNYHA offers members assistance reporting AUR data into NHSN and using the data to inform patient safety efforts via the GNYHA AUR Collaborative.
Safety and Equity
Vulnerable populations are more likely to experience patient safety events, and high-quality care is only possible with equitable, safe care. Both are fundamental dimensions of health care quality. GNYHA provides resources to help members achieve their patient safety goals. Resources include member briefings on new CMS health equity measures and new accreditation standards from The Joint Commission (TJC), which can be found on GNYHA’s website. A GNYHA virtual training session provides background for frontline staff and managers on why hospital collection of demographic data is important to institutional efforts to address health disparities.
Building Improvement Capacity for Patient Safety
GNYHA is committed to helping our member organizations build improvement capacity to provide high-quality care across the New York region. Programs in which members can participate include:
Quality Fundamentals: Basics
Designed to introduce the principles of quality improvement (QI) to frontline staff, this half-day course teaches participants how to prepare and plan a successful hospital-based QI initiative and select meaningful measures of success to ensure sustainability. Please contact Kendall LaSane for more information.
Quality Fundamentals: Plus – Beyond the Basics (QF Plus)
Building on the principles introduced in Quality Fundamentals: Basics, QF Plus reviews more advanced QI tools to ensure that gains from QI projects are sustained. The course is split into two sessions. Participants can sign up for either session or both. For more information, please contact Wing Lee.
Clinical Quality Fellowship Program
GNYHA and the United Hospital Fund established the 15-month Clinical Quality Fellowship Program more than a decade ago to train the next generation of clinical leaders in health care quality and patient safety. Please contact Elina Kats for more information.