Nationwide Children's Hospital Celebrates Safety Week 2026

SPS is celebrating Patient and Employee Safety Week on March 8-14! In celebration of #SPSsafetyweek2026, we’re highlighting the awesome patient and employee safety improvement work within our organizations! Next up is Nationwide Children's Hospital!

At Nationwide Children’s Hospital, the Medication Safety Core Team is redefining what’s possible in medication safety through innovation, collaboration, and sustained excellence. During Safety Week, we’re proud to spotlight the team as recipients of the 2026 Robert L. Wears Patient Safety Leadership Award (Team Category).

Administering more than 3.2 million medication doses each year, Nationwide Children’s maintains an extraordinary error rate of just 0.2 per 10,000 doses dispensed. Through rigorous quality improvement and system‑level interventions, the organization has achieved an 85%+ reduction in harmful adverse drug events, reflecting nearly a decade of high performance.

To continue improving beyond a long‑standing plateau, the team evolved their approach — introducing Proactive Safety Huddles, Learning Teams, and Walk‑Through Talk‑Throughs (WT3). These strategies foster real‑time learning, anticipatory risk mitigation, and strong frontline engagement, helping shift safety from reactive review to proactive prevention.

The team’s impact extends beyond operations. With more than 10 peer‑reviewed publications, their work has helped advance national conversations around medication safety and modern safety science.

Grounded in interprofessional collaboration across inpatient, outpatient, ambulatory, and behavioral health settings, the Medication Safety Core Team exemplifies the legacy of Dr. Wears and a systems‑based approach to safer care—every day.