Dear Nurse Colleague:
Providing a safe environment for our patients is vital to ensuring excellent nursing care.
Our policies and systems within the Nursing Department exist to enhance safety. We introduce and use new technologies such as eMAR and Smart Pumps, as well as practices such as those included in the National Patient Safety Goals, in order to build and maintain a safe environment.
As an institution, BWH is nationally recognized for its efforts and ongoing commitment to quality and safety. Recently, BWH was honored with the prestigious National Quality Health Care Award. In a story highlighting BWH, Modern Healthcare magazine noted that our staff and leaders are never satisfied with the status quo.
Through Patient Safety Executive Walk Rounds and meetings with clinical staff, we have shared our mutual commitment to building the safest environment for patients. In these meetings, you have told me of potential safety issues and problems that hinder care delivery. Your input and feedback through these meetings, through talking with your managers and through reports filed in the Safety Reporting System, are crucial as we work together to ensure that no nurse feels left alone in his or her practice. This means working together so that change can be initiated at all levels to improve nursing care, reduce errors and implement “safe systems.” I urge you to remain diligent in reporting anything that hinders care or causes harm, or has the potential to do so, and to stay engaged in this ongoing process.
In this issue of BWH Nurse, we read about several awards that are reflective of our commitment to providing excellent nursing care in the safest environment. The Advisory Board’s Nursing Executive Center recognized our PACU and Center for Labor and Birth for best nursing practices that foster the safest environment of care. These external validations are wonderful honors, certainly, but the real rewards come from knowing our patients are receiving excellent nursing care by the very best nursing staff in the safest environment. In the patient safety update, we see that the reports you submit to the Web-based Safety Reporting system lead to concrete improvements, including last month’s update to the eMAR dictionary and the implementation of regular checks of bed alarms on Tower-10CD.
As nurses, we have an important role to play in creating and maintaining the safest environment. We are proud of the awards that recognize our efforts, as we continue to improve.
Sincerely,
Mairead Hickey, PhD, RN
Chief Nursing Officer and
Senior Vice President of Patient Care Services