Keeping patients safe
In health care, safety means making sure patients aren’t harmed by their medical care. At UAB Medicine, keeping our patients safe is very important to us. Like many other hospitals, we have rules and programs to help keep everyone safe. But we believe that safety should be a part of everything we do, not just something we check off a list.
We want to create a strong culture of safety at UAB Medicine. This means everyone who works here must pay attention to safety and work together to prevent mistakes. When we focus on safety, we can find problems before they affect a patient.
Here are some things we do to help ensure a safe environment:
- We ask our staff for help in spotting areas where we can improve safety by using surveys and having leaders talk to them.
- We give praise and rewards to staff members who help keep patients safe by reporting when they catch a mistake before it can cause harm.
- We use proven tools to track and analyze safety events and trends, so that we can better understand and improve patient care.
We want to make sure that the measures we report about patient safety show how well we’re doing in keeping our patients safe.
If you are a UAB employee, you may hear us talk about this work in the Vizient Safety Domain.
Understanding health care-associated infections
When you go to the doctor or hospital, sometimes you can get an infection that you didn’t have before. This is called a health care-associated infection, or HAI for short. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that about 1 in every 31 patients gets an HAI each year. This happens in places like hospitals, clinics, and nursing homes.
Our main goal is to stop all HAIs from happening, but that can be tough. One reason is that our skin protects us from germs, and when we get medical treatment, doctors often need to make small openings in our skin to help us. These openings can let germs in and cause infections.
Another reason is that many people who are getting treatment for another sickness might have weaker immune systems. The immune system is your body’s defense against germs. If it’s not strong, it can’t fight off infections as well.
Even with these challenges, most health care-associated infections can be prevented. At UAB Medicine, we take special steps to keep our patients safe from germs that can cause infections when they are getting medical care. Some things we do include:
1. Washing hands: We make sure to wash our hands properly with soap and water or use hand sanitizer to clean them.
2. Using clean tools: When we put medical devices (like tubes or needles) into the body, we follow strict guidelines to keep everything really clean.
3. Wearing protective gear: Our staff wear gowns and gloves to stop germs from spreading.
4. Cleaning the environment: We regularly clean the places where patients are treated, to make sure they are safe.
In addition to these important steps, we also use something called “evidence-based care bundles.” This means we follow a group of health care practices that research has shown work well together to prevent infections.
When an infection does happen at UAB Medicine, we look carefully at what went wrong. We share what we learn with everyone on our team, so we can keep getting better at taking care of our patients.re bundle is a small set of research-proven health care practices that help prevent health care-associated infection when used consistently. Every infection that occurs at UAB Medicine is closely examined, and lessons learned are shared among all staff to continually improve our quality of care.