Good/Better/Zero: The Safety Journey Continues

Mutual accountability can propel us closer to the goal

By Jim Lindsey, MD, Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer; and Joyce Batcheller, RN, MSN, NEA-BC, Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer

For a moment, imagine that your job requires you to know how to operate a portable external defibrillator, a device that "jump starts" some one's heart when its normal rhythm stops. You’ve been trained in how to use the device and your team regularly checks to make sure it is working properly.

Now imagine that you are assigned to another unit in the hospital and a visitor has a heart attack. You know exactly what to do. But, the defibrillator in this wing of the hospital is a different model than the one you’ve practiced on. You can’t tell if the equipment is malfunctioning or not.

Fortunately, the patient is revived by other means, but you’re shaken and feel let down by "the system." Gaps in a hospital system can undermine even the best science. Worse, they can demoralize people on a mission.

The good news is that we have no shortage of smart, committed associates to solve problems like this one, when we know that they exist. With the right mindset, negative events can be the catalyst for positive and lasting change.

Thanks to you, Seton has made extraordinary progress in the five years since we began our journey to eliminate all preventable associate and patient harm.

As a result of associates’ early adoption of evidence-based best practices and increasing compliance with sequenced initiatives, Seton’s mortality rate is among the very best in the nation despite an increasingly complex case load. Preventable injuries are headed in the right direction, too, and Seton has received international recognition for obstetrical care. Whether you’ve been motivated by the scientific challenge or a spiritual need to make ours the safest possible environment for patients and co-workers – or a combination of the two – you've made Seton a safer place to work and visit.

Yet, if you’ve been an active participant in safety initiatives, you know that this journey unfolds in unexpected ways. We may conquer a mountainous challenge only to discover another, steeper target in its shadow. But we learn simply by taking each step.

Having bettered or bested our own performance in a number of areas, it's time for Seton to enter the crucial stage of mutual accountability. It is only through the exercise of shared responsibility that we can break down some of the existing barriers to Zero.

Mutual accountability isn't easy because it can look and feel like conflict or involving oneself in someone else’s business. It takes a special spirit to halt an unsafe practice in progress. It takes special effort to raise a decentralized issue like different models of defibrillators across the network.

It takes a special person to accept the fact that none of us is perfect. No system is perfect. We must continuously work to improve our processes, our operational decision-making and our individual practice.

Through a combination of individual commitment and continued teamwork, we will be successful advancing toward Zero.

Journey on!