We hold ourselves accountable for preventing harm.

One of the most challenging safety initiatives is prevention of hospital-acquired infections, and the reason is that it involves the whole community of care, from the housekeepers to the surgeons and everyone in between. An organization that can orchestrate all of those caregivers at every level to do the right thing is an organization that is very focused and very clear on the message. And so we’re very proud of our achievement thus far.“
Dr. Justine M. Carr, Chief Medical Officer

Culture of Safety

On October 19, 2009, over 300 Caritas front line clinical staff, physicians, senior leadership and trustees assembled to launch our Culture of Safety Initiative. The day was spent learning about "Culture of Safety." What is it? How do we achieve it? How do we come to exemplify it in all that we do? While pledging to continue our targeted system initiatives to reduce specific harm, such as hospital acquired infections (see graphs), we committed to creating a culture where every member of the Caritas community is focused on preventable harm.

In FY09 we reduced preventable harm by 30% from FY08. In FY10 our Board of Governors and hospital trustees and leadership committed to a once unthinkable 50% further reduction in harm. We hold every member of the Caritas Community accountable for knowing and practicing the six behaviors that characterize a culture of safety:

Pay Attention to Details
Communicate Clearly
Have a Questioning Attitude
Perform Effective Handovers
Work together with your team
Follow the Rules

In our weekly quality report card we celebrate a Safety Hero-an employee or team who put the safety behaviors into practice and prevented harm. We also report on the number of days it has been since the last preventable patient harm. Our record board as of March 2010 is listed below:

Event	Event free internal record (Mar 2010)	Record Holder
Fall	20 days	Holy Family Hospital
Fall with injury	60 days	Carney Hospital
Hospital acquired central line infection	501 days	Carney Hospital
Hospital acquired ventilator associated pneumonia	1535 days	Saint Anne's Hospital
Hospital acquired methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus infection (MRSA)	239 days	Saint Anne's Hospital
Hospital acquired Vancomycin resistant enterococcus infection	501 days	Holy Family Hospital
Hospital acquired C. difficile infection	134 days	Saint Anne's Hospital

A Focus on Infections

Reducing hospital-acquired infections (HAI) is a major priority for Caritas Christi. HAIs affect 5-10% of the 40 million patients hospitalized each year - that's 2 million patients. HAIs are associated with 90,000 needless deaths each year.

In conjunction with the Institute for Health Care Improvement (IHI) 5 Million Lives Campaign, we have worked collaboratively across the system to reduce hospital-acquired infections.

Measuring How We Perform

We have identified central line infections in the intensive care unit (ICU), ventilator associated pneumonia (VAP), and methicillin-resistant staph aureus (MRSA) infections as the three most critical types of infections. Use the links below to see how we measure up and how we are planning to perform even better.