Le Bonheur Children's Hospital Celebrates Safety Week!

In conjunction with IHI, SPS is celebrating Safety Week on March 12-18! In celebration of #SPSsafetyweek2023, we’re highlighting the awesome patient and employee safety improvement work going on within our organizations! First up is Le Bonheur Children's Hospital who’s celebrating their nursing, respiratory therapy, & pharmacy staff.

Following an unusual decline in their 2021 Adverse Drug Events (ADE) performance of Category F-I harms, the ADE Prevention Taskforce was developed & commissioned to remove barriers for preventable ADEs. This multi-disciplinary team, including frontline staff members from every inpatient department, went to work! They identified the need for updated Barcode Medication Administration (BCMA) scanners, which were promptly escalated to administration and approved for replacement. This improved their BCMA compliance.

They developed a reporting tool within their intranet using the staff's perspective and several resources within the facility. This reporting tool provides quick access for intervention for staff to report BCMA medication label scanning issues, as well as request medication library profile updates as they are identified. This reporting tool was later presented by their system-level Medication Safety Officer at a National Medication Safety Convention as a podium speech discussion.

In October 2022, Le Bonheur Children's Hospital celebrated one year of zero ADE harms for Category F-I and distributed pill-shaped cookies to honor the frontline staff! They are additionally working to improve their ADE Category E event rate and making significant progress. It’s been 513 days since their last Category F-I event & 269 days since their last Category E event (and counting!).

Congratulations to all of the frontline staff! The ADE Prevention Taskforce continues to remove ADE barriers for the staff to ensure a culture of safety!