Patient Safety Consultant Quality and Improvement Job
Date:Aug 21, 2014
Location:Bellingham, WA, US
PeaceHealth, based in Vancouver, Wash., is a not-for-profit Catholic health system offering care to communities in Washington, Oregon, and Alaska. PeaceHealth has approximately 16,000 caregivers, a multi-specialty medical group practice with more than 800 physicians and providers, a comprehensive laboratory system, and nine medical centers serving both urban and rural communities throughout the Northwest. In 1890, Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace founded what has become PeaceHealth. Today, PeaceHealth is the legacy of its founding Sisters and continues to serve communities when invited to do so with a spirit of collaboration and stewardship. This is The Spirit of Healing—The Spirit of PeaceHealth.
Department:Patient Safety (7815)
Takes a leadership role in the network of care. Accountable for the patient safety program within assigned scope of responsibility; model and develop a culture of safety; identify opportunities and implement initiatives to enhance patient safety. Apply critical decision making ability in the determination of severity of events and their root causes to take appropriate action to mitigate or prevent reoccurrence and handle highly sensitive information in confidential, mature manner.
1. Review and analyze all sentinel events and selected near-miss close calls to identify system factors contributing to error. Discuss incidents with individuals involved and engage them to explain how the process of care needs to be redesigned to prevent recurrence. Make critical decisions about root causes of adverse events and recommend, design, develop and implement action plans to prevent or mitigate future occurrences.
2. Maintain statistical tabulations and summaries of patient-safety-related occurrences and make appropriate reports to various agencies (or Patient Safety Organizations) as required by law or determined by the organization. Meet Regularly (weekly) with key stakeholders to prioritize concerns and determine appropriate level of review/investigation. Develop and implement action plans to prevent or mitigate future occurrences. Ensure subsequent follow up with caregivers for completion of action items to determine effectiveness of solutions and/or improvements designed to prevent reoccurrence.
3. Participate in system wide meetings to ensure that lessons learned from incidents in one community are shared and enhancements to process or procedures are implemented across the entire organization to mitigate occurrence in another PeaceHealth community.
4. Serve as coach or primary data resource for individual unit patient safety representatives seeking to engage in focused patient safety projects. Encourage collaboration with other areas as appropriate. Co- Chair the unit based safety council meetings with the PSO.
5. Conduct routine tours of the entire hospital to foster transparency and to hear from staff what their greatest concerns are about the environment in which they work. Use this process to develop a list of priorities for staff education and resource allocation.
6. Co-facilitate meetings, develop agendas and document the proceedings of the hospital patient safety committee. Ensure follow through on action items.
7. Develop, implement, and maintain educational patient safety programs for all hospital caregivers.
8. Work collaboratively with leadership, to develop and implement strategies to eliminate harm to patients. Through collaboration and partnerships with caregivers, implement programs and services that produce measurable improvements in processes and practices that affect patient safety, ultimately resulting in a decrease in numbers, costs and severity levels of healthcare associated harm incidents.
9. Proactively and reactively address patient safety issues utilizing data from Root Cause Analysis, the AHRQ Patient Safety Culture survey, AHRQ Patient Safety indicators, internal reporting systems, information from facility and system Patient Safety Committees, Executive Rounding and other national and state reports and alerts to analyze issues, determine their root causes, and implement effective and reliable solutions. Participate in the development of system-wide action plans to ensure that lessons learned are spread across the entire organization so that problems resolved in one area of the organization do not reappear elsewhere.
10. The role has primary responsibility for conducting RCAs and FMEAs for events occurring within the Network. May be called upon to participate and assist with another network’s RCA/ FMEA process or system-wide events periodically. .
11. Perform other duties as assigned.
Bachelor's Degree in healthcare related field required
Minimum 3 years of prior experience in nursing, quality improvement, or risk management.
Licensed/Registered RN or Certified in a Clinical equivalent field required. Certified Professional in Healthcare Quality is preferred.
Excellent interpersonal skills
Location: Bellingham, WA
Posting Notes: Bellingham, WA || Risk/Quality || Full Time || QUALITY IMPROVEMENT