Maria Fareri 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! Next up is Maria Fareri Children's Hospital at WMCHealth who’s celebrating Marilyn Scharbach MD, Mary Beth Lyons RN, Nicole Farmer RN, Julianne Darcey RN, Kathleen Drogan RN, Cara Nemeth RN, Michelle Cacciola RN, and Katherine Gannon RN.

The Pressure Injury HAC Team at Maria Fareri Children's Hospital began its work in January 2018. At the time they recognized that they had a serious problem with pressure injuries. Following SPS recommendations, implementing best practice bundles, focusing on prevention training, utilizing QI principles, and borrowing tools from SPS presentations they have begun to move the dial, including in the high-risk NICU.

The challenges that they have had to overcome over the five years have included changes in medical leadership, changes in nursing leadership, competing hospital priorities, increasing patient volumes and acuity especially during and after the peaks of covid, unfilled wound specialist positions, needing a big lift in front line training in recognition and prevention, reporting inconsistencies, and less than needed emphasis on this issue. Gradually these obstacles have been overcome with training, job aides, improved risk assessments, weekly skin checks by unit nurse managers, and reported at several patient safety meetings.

Currently, all pressure injuries are entered into their safety event reporting system, reported out at the daily Morning Safety Briefing for hospital awareness, reviewed in the weekly Safety Event Review and Classification Team meeting, reported to the Board of Directors of WMCHealth in addition to being analyzed in depth by the PI HAC team.

In 2019 they had a rate of PI stages 3, 4, and unstageable of 0.120. They chose PIs as their site-specific HAC for the current cycle and set their goal of a reduction in the centerline of PIs stages 3, 4, and unstageable to 0.062. As of January 2023, they have surpassed this goal. They have had zero PIs stages 3, 4, and unstageable in 11 months. Congratulations to Maria Fareri Children's Hospital's PI HAC team!