Quality is Job One

Good morning. 

Today I want to take the opportunity to reaffirm what I’ve said many times in this column and other spaces: Patient safety and clinical quality are our top health care priorities. 

And to tag onto that, I want to make sure everyone – regardless of role – knows you have a part to play in our patient care safety/quality. This is vitally important. You are expected to do your part each and every day. 

Here, every day we focus on patient safety and clinical quality. But next week, on Wednesday, Sept. 17, the entire globe will join us in this for the World Health Organization’s World Patient Safety Day.  

Led by Chief Medical Officer Dr. Lisa Didion, her staff and an army of managers and front-line leaders, the effort aims to boost the culture of safety at UMMC that ensures our shared values and beliefs around safety lead to everyday behaviors that reduce errors and ultimately improve patient outcomes.  

Since we made this our top organizational priority nearly 10 years ago, we’ve made significant improvements – and our patients are the beneficiaries. 

Simply put, our patients expect three things: 

• Help me. 
• Don’t harm me. 
• Be kind to me. 

It can’t get any clearer than that. 

Data show that nationally, one in 10 patients are harmed in some way while receiving health care and that preventable medical errors cost health care institutions around $17 billion each year. By staying intentional about patient safety and preventing avoidable harm, we not only protect those we are here to serve but also help safeguard our limited resources. Every case of error-free care is a win for our patients and our organization. 

To start, I encourage all of you to check out the quality/safety scorecard. You can find our scores linked as a shortcut on the front page of the intranet. This is the “source of truth” for metrics that matter most to our patients and most significantly impact our safety reputation scores that are used to determine our institutional grades and/or star rating.  

Patient safety isn’t just what our patients expect. It’s essential to our bottom line and, most importantly, it’s the right thing to do. 

We must continue to push for zero harm. That means having a culture of safety and systems in place to prevent the inevitable human error from reaching the patient. That’s a lofty goal but one we should try to reach for our patients and ourselves because it is the direct path to our ultimate destination, A Healthier Mississippi.