About Us

CHRISTUS St. Patrick Quality Report

Patient Safety

At CHRISTUS St. Patrick, we know that there is no more serious responsibility than the one we take on every day, with literally thousands of patients entrusted to our care. In keeping with a major national initiative, CHRISTUS St. Patrick has many effective patient safety programs in place, and more are coming on line every day. Many are the result of creative ideas from our employees, the front line clinicians and caregivers who saw what was working—and what wasn't—and took the initiative to fix it, and to make suggestions for programs and policies to better safeguard patients.

The Joint Commission's National Patient Safety Goals and their requirements are a series of specific actions that accredited organizations are expected to take in order to prevent medical errors such as miscommunication among caregivers, unsafe use of infusion pumps, and medication mix-ups.

National Patient Safety Goals are scored as a "check" to show the implementation of the goal or an acceptable alternative; a "minus" to show lack of compliance with the goal; or an N/A to show the goal does not apply to this organization.

The following chart shows St. Patrick's performance with the National Patient Safety Goals.

2004 Safety goals	Organizations should	Implemented
Identify Patients Correctly	Use at least two (2) ways to identify a patient when performing procedures, taking blood or giving medicines or blood products. The patient's room number cannot be used to identify the patient.
	Use a "time-out" just before starting the procedure to allow the entire surgical team to ensure the correct patient, procedure and body part.
Improve Effective Communication	Assure a staff member who receives an order over the phone or verbally, will "read back" the order to the person who gave the order.
	Create a list of acceptable standardized abbreviations and a “Do Not Use” list to help reduce the risk of errors. Medical abbreviations can lead to errors.
Improve the Safety of High-Alert Medications	Remove high-alert medications from patient care units. Medications that have the highest risk of causing injury when misused are called "High-Alert" Medications.
Eliminate wrong-body part, wrong-patient, wrong-procedure surgery.	Develop a way to check that all documents and equipment needed for surgery are on hand for staff before surgery begins.
	Mark the part of the body where the surgery will be done. Involve the patient in doing this.
Improve Infusion Pump Safety	Assure pumps used to give fluids or medicine into a vein are set so that the fluid cannot be given too quickly. An infusion pump releases an amount of medicine in a specific period of time.
Improve the Effectiveness of Patient Care Alarms	Assure alarm systems that monitor patients are regularly tested and adjusted, if needed, to prevent any problems.
	Alarms are turned on with the correct settings and are loud enough to be heard within the patient unit.
Reduce Health Care Acquired Infections	Follow current Centers for Disease Control (CDC) handwashing guidelines.
	Manage as sentinel events all cases of health care-acquired infections. A sentinel event is any unanticipated death or major permanent loss of function.

What is CHRISTUS St. Patrick doing to ensure patient safety?

Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, www.qualitycheck.org

For more information on patient safety and quality in health care, visit one of these sites:

• www.qualitycheck.org
• www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov
  
• www.lahealthinform.org
  
• www.p4ps.org
  
• www.ion.edu

Back to top.