Nurses at Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hawkins are working with their
counterparts at thousands of hospitals throughout the country in a
campaign to save more than 100,000 lives this year by implementing
a series of new health care practices designed to prevent avoidable
deaths.
Hollister – Nurses at Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hawkins are working with their counterparts at thousands of hospitals throughout the country in a campaign to save more than 100,000 lives this year by implementing a series of new health care practices designed to prevent avoidable deaths.
Hazel Hawkins is one of more than 3,000 hospitals nationwide to take part in the “100,000 Lives Campaign,” started in 2004 by the Institute for Healthcare Improvements, said Leah Dowty, director of the Hazel Hawkins Hospital Foundation. The idea behind the campaign is that if enough hospitals join together to implement policies – on everything from preventing drug interaction deaths to preventing the infection of surgical wounds – that lives will be saved, Dowty said.
The campaign is also an economical way for the hospital to learn new patient care strategies from the best in the business, Dowty said.
“It’s taking the best existing protocols that work,” she said. “And learning from the best health care institutions in the country without having to travel.”
Four months ago, the hospital secured a $20,000 grant from The Blue Shield Foundation to purchase supplies and mitigate the impact of personnel costs in the hospital’s effort to implement several new policies aimed at saving lives that have already proven to be effective, Dowty said.
One of the most promising new strategies the hospital has implemented is designed to prevent adverse drug interactions, said Betty Littfin, the hospital’s Quality and Risk Manager. Drug interactions can result in death, Littfin said.
Nationwide it is estimated that medication errors are responsible for 7,000 deaths annually, according to the Institute of Medicine, a private group that conducts studies for the government. Statistics on how many patients at Hazel Hawkins died last year from adverse drug interactions was not available by press time.
“We’re developing a medication reconciliation list for all patients that come to the hospital,” Littfin said. “That means when they leave here they will have a written list of their medications to show to doctors and pharmacists.”
When patients come to the hospital their medications are often changed – either they will take new medications or stop taking old medications – which can be confusing, Littfin said.
“This way (patients) don’t loose track of the medications they’re on,” she said. “It’s making sure we’re all on the same page.”
In addition to preventing drug interactions, nurses are also focusing on preventing ventilator-associated pneumonia and surgical site infections, said Linley Stanger, the hospital’s head nursing administrator.
“We chose the areas because we want to make sure we’re up to date on all the standards,” she said. “We’re improving our standards just like other hospitals are doing nationwide.”
Nurses participate in the nationwide campaign by attending local meetings with other nurses and administrators, joining a series of ongoing Internet and telephone conferences and helping to implement the new policies and procedures, Stanger said.
Although nurses haven’t seen a significant impact from it yet, Littfin said the new drug interaction policy could pay off in spades.
“It’s too soon – we’ve just started to implement all these standards,” she said. “I hope at the end of 2006 we can start to see some results from this.”
Just what those results will look like is not clear, though.
“We may never know how many lives have been saved,” she said. “But collectively we know we are participating in a larger group and following the best practices.”
And simply being a part of the campaign helps nurses by providing them with additional resources, Littfin said.
“We’re a smaller hospital so we don’t have a lot of resources in terms of data collection,” she said. “And any time you have a network of support, that helps.”
