Hospital safety improvements will outlast COVID-19
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck the U.S. last year, hospitals were forced to adapt quickly and rethink worker and patient safety on the fly while dealing with a highly contagious and little-known disease.
The novel coronavirus forced hospitals to quicken the pace when it comes to safety improvement, which was a departure from what’s normally a glacial pace. Even as the pandemic lingers, hospital administrators now see that some of the changes they implemented to react to a specific outbreak should stay in place.
From allowing patients to sleep longer to instituting daily escalation huddles, there are processes that will likely stick around long after COVID-19’s severe consequences fade because they’ve enhanced safety and quality.
“This has so changed the delivery of healthcare in many, many ways that there are some components that there’s just no going back,” said Charleen Tachibana, senior vice president and chief quality, safety and patient experience officer at Virginia Mason Franciscan Health in Seattle.
Virginia Mason Franciscan created a nurse observer and monitor role that proved critical as the system saw higher degrees of patient acuity coupled with a workforce shortage.
The not-for-profit health system already had a centralized mission control center. As a result of the pandemic, nurses now use that system to watch patients’ vital signs remotely. The mission control center also serves as a consult service for remote hospitals in the network.
Virginia Mason Franciscan also uses this system to provide virtual supervision of bedside nurses to ensure tasks are correctly completed.
“You would have a centralized nurse somewhere who could come in by camera remotely, and do that check with you,” Tachibana said. “There’s now another level of care oversight layered on top of a burdened and stretched workforce that’s providing monitoring.”
Workers inserted more catheters and more central lines, and there were more patients on ventilators because of the severity of their illnesses. Ultimately, these factors equate to more chances for patient harm.
Bassett Healthcare Network of Cooperstown, New York, recognized those risks, and started daily escalation huddles. Front-line staff on each unit meet at 8:30 a.m. every day to air concerns about safety and quality. Their managers then
report on those gatherings during a director-level meeting at 9 a.m. Issues are handled on the spot and then communicated to senior executives.
“The executive leadership team really wanted to know the day-today concerns and that’s key because traditionally, executive staff don’t want to be bothered with the small stuff,” said Russell Grant, the not-forprofit system’s director of infection control and prevention. “That was a real shift, and I think a very positive shift for the organization. The plan is to continue these long after the COVID-19 pandemic.”
figure out how to reduce front-line worker exposure to COVID-19 patients, and many did it through what’s called “clustering.” So instead of a worker entering a patient area about 100 times during a shift, that could be cut down by half.
NYC Health + Hospitals did this by tinkering with its electronic health record system and other technology. Usually a worker would be prompted to do a routine task like taking blood for a lab test. Previously, an alert would go off every two hours for these tasks, interrupting patient rest, which has been shown to negatively impact recovery. So the New York City-based municipal health system programed the alerts to block off six hours for patients to sleep, or to only sound when a patient is awake.
“Or if a call bell goes off, we are able to check in through video,” and then deliver whatever a patient needed, said Dr. Eric Wei, senior vice president and chief quality officer at NYC Health + Hospitals. “(We had to) improve the monitoring of patients while decreasing the number of times that people had to go into inpatient rooms.”
for which health workers would have to be exposed to patients’ breath became big events. Hospitals routinely administer nebulizer treatments to asthma patients, which forces medicine into the airway through high-powered oxygen, and usually prompts coughing, for example. COVID-19 changed that routine.
“Before when people were having respiratory treatment, we would walk in and out without even a mask on—it just wasn’t something that we thought about,” said Daria Kring, vice president of clinical and patient education at Novant Health, based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “I can imagine where we won’t think of them as benign events for a very long time.”
Now if a patient needs cardiopulmonary resuscitation, Novant employees have a guide to follow for this aerosol-generating procedure. Staff now must wear respirators during these treatments, and there are signs on doors warning others to not enter until a space has been long vacant.
Of course, some safety innovations can lead to unexpected negative outcomes, said Patricia McGaffigan, vice president of safety programs at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Many hospitals have wisely implemented so-called failure mode and effects analyses, she said.
“We’ve got to think about the unintended consequences of making a change—or what we think is improvement—that are not going to outweigh the benefits of it overall,” McGaffigan said. “What we’re looking at is an extension of the collective learning and the development of skill sets that we’ve seen be more broadly disseminated
n throughout organizations overall.”