SPS Talk Children's Hospitals' Solutions for Patient Safety

In the newest episode of SPS Talk, we hear from the CLABSI work stream co-leads Marjorie McCaskey, DNP, RN-BC, CPHQ, Clinical Outcomes and Quality Adviser for Nursing and Director of Nursing Professional Development at Children’s of Alabama, and Dr. Elizabeth Mack, Professor of Pediatrics, Division Director of Pediatric Critical Care, University Faculty Ombuds, and Medical Director of GME Quality and Safety at the Medical University of South Carolina. Listen as they discuss the network’s top ten CLABSI prevention questions such as:
How should we compare ourselves to other hospitals?
What happens when your clinicians don’t agree with the IP’s CLABSI call? Does everyone call CLABSIs the same?
What happens when we can’t get CHG wipes, when families refuse CHG treatment, or when we have a shortage of products?
These are only three of the ten questions so make sure to tune in for more information on CLABSI prevention.
If you have any questions on the CLABSI work stream, the discussion, or the upcoming SPS Learning Session, please reach out to ochsps@cchmc.org. 

We encourage you to listen to this 8-minute podcast with Dr. Amrit Gill, the Patient Safety Officer for Cleveland Clinic Children’s. On this podcast, Dr. Gill highlighted the important role of physicians in keeping the safety momentum moving forward. One way that she recommends doing this is by celebrating successes. Additionally, she encouraged physician leaders to see challenges and setbacks as a learning opportunity by sharing lessons learned. She shared the role of physician leaders in closing the loop with staff by talking about how they are working to resolve issues from past safety rounds as well as assigning owners to new problems.  Additionally, she remarked that there is immense power in storytelling—these stories motivate and re-energize the listeners to continue to work towards making things safer. She encouraged physicians to set goals and make plans so that we can “together keep our patients safe.”

We encourage you to listen to this 7-minute podcast with Dr. Claudia Hoyen, Director of Pediatric Innovation and Medical Director, Peds Infection Control, UH/Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital. In our drive to eliminate serious harm in children’s hospitals, we know we have to find new solutions, and as part of this effort, SPS has launched a new innovations program. On this podcast, Dr. Hoyen, a co-leader for this new program, shared innovation work that is being done at her hospital. At Rainbow, they’ve been working hard to reduce CLABSIs. After many huddles, the hospital found that the lines of their patients who had GI issues had somehow become compromised and ended in places where they didn’t belong. Following this realization, Dr. Hoyen met a couple who had just formed a company called CareAline. The couple invented CareAline wraps, wraps that can be safely tucked away when the central line is not in use, out of a direct need for their child who was a patient at Rainbow. The success of the wraps inspired many, and Rainbow has successfully instituted them as part of their bundle. Importantly, in the last year and a half since instituting the wraps, the hospital has seen no additional infections due to a line being in a place it didn’t belong.
SPS Network members, we hope this inspiring innovation story encourages you to submit an innovation proposal to SPS. Please check out the announcements section of the SPS SharePoint homepage for additional information.

We encourage you to listen to this 11-minute podcast with Dr. Leslie Jurecko, Vice President for Quality, Safety, and Experience at Spectrum Health, a nonprofit health system with 15 hospitals, a physician group, and health plan in Michigan. Dr. Jurecko is also a practicing Pediatric Hospitalist at Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital, which is the children’s hospital within the larger Spectrum System. In this podcast, Dr. Jurecko provides concepts to reflect on and engagement strategies you can utilize to align your children’s hospital with the larger system and yet still create great improvement work at the local level. For your children’s hospital within a system to get to the ideal state, she shared that “hard work and improved outcomes locally will pave your future to easier success in the larger system.” Listen to this podcast today to learn specific strategies you can use to overcome common barriers that children’s hospitals within systems face!

If you missed our podcast with Dr. Rahul Shah, Vice President, Chief Quality and Safety Officer, Children’s National Medical Center, we encourage you to listen to it today! On the podcast, Dr. Shah shared his thoughts about the physicians’ role in driving engagement on a safety survey.
Dr. Shah shared how his hospital used a safety attitude questionnaire to drive physician engagement. Dr. Shah highlighted the importance of line item authority of physicians, understanding the data, and executive engagement and accountability. His hope is that this podcast will help you move a little closer to engaging physicians in safety culture surveys.

In this 12-minute podcast, Dr. Lennox Huang, the Chief Medical Officer and Vice President for Medical and Academic Affairs at The Hospital for Sick Children, shares how storytelling is a leadership competency—a way of sharing knowledge, moving people, and moving culture. He emphasizes, “Storytelling is so much more than conveying information and facts; it’s also about conveying emotion and showing people how much you care about things.”
Dr. Huang shares the importance of having a bit of structure for a story to resonate with an audience. He encourages the storyteller to give the audience a sense of who the story is about, the emotion around the story, the impact that story had on the characters, and to conclude with a lesson or reason for telling the story. He concludes the podcast by encouraging listeners to “use your stories to help improve safety at your institution and at others as well.”