The University of Vermont Medical Center was one of two recipients of a humanitarian award from the Patient Safety Movement Foundation for making significant strides to reduce and eliminate preventable patient harm. The award recognizes years of sustained effort in the field. The other recipient this year was the Texas-based American Association for Respiratory Care.
The award was announced at the foundation’s third annual Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit in Irvine, CA. Previous recipients include United States Senator Barbara Boxer and Jennifer Howse, Ph.D., president, March of Dimes Foundation.
“It is an honor to accept this award on behalf of the University of Vermont Medical Center,” said Eileen Whalen, M.H.A., R.N., president, COO and acting CNO. “It is another affirmation of the hard work our staff does every day to ensure our patients are in the safest hospital environment possible.”
“The UVM Medical Center has created a culture of safety that encourages collaboration across all disciplines, involving administrative leaders, health care providers, caregivers, infection prevention and quality improvement experts, environmental services staff, and a team of infection prevention advocates from across the hospital, ambulatory clinics, and dialysis centers,” says Anna Noonan, R.N., vice president of the James M. Jeffords Institute for Quality & Operational Effectiveness at the medical center.
“For years, multidisciplinary teams have focused on quality and safety initiatives and preventing infections as part of those efforts,” she continues. “These efforts have significantly reduced central line-associated bloodstream infections, surgical site infections, and other healthcare-associated infections within the medical center.”
Last year the medical center was the only hospital in the nation to receive the Partnership in Prevention Award given by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, and the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, for achieving sustainable improvements toward eliminating healthcare-associated infections.
In 2013, the medical center was ranked number one in patient safety in an annual study conducted by University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC). The study is recognized as the most important analysis of its kind. UHC is an alliance of nearly all of the academic medical centers in the United States.
The medical center has also been recognized for its work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to develop protocols to dramatically reduce access-related bloodstream infections in outpatient dialysis clinics. These protocols are now the CDC’s national recommendations.
About The Patient Safety Movement Foundation
More than 200,000 people die every year in U.S. hospitals in ways that could have been prevented. The Patient Safety Movement Foundation was founded by Joe Kiani through the support of the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation, and Competition in Healthcare, to reduce the number of preventable deaths to 0 by 2020 (0x2020). Improving patient safety will require a collaborative effort from all stakeholders, including patients, healthcare providers, medical technology companies, government, employers, and private payers. The Patient Safety Movement Foundation works with all stakeholders to understand the problems and create solutions to improve patient safety. The Foundation also convenes Patient Safety, Science and Technology Summits. The Summits connect the dots between people, ideas and action. By presenting specific, high-impact Actionable Patient Safety Solutions (APSS) to meet patient safety challenges, asking medical technology companies to share the data that their products are purchased for, and asking hospitals to make commitments to implement the APSS, the Patient Safety Movement Foundation is working toward zero preventable deaths by 2020. Visit www.patientsafetymovement.org.