Medical errors and unsafe care kill tens of thousands of Americans each year. For example, an estimated two million healthcare-associated infections occur each year in the United States, accounting for approximately 90,000 deaths.
Consequently, the National Quality Forum (NQF) recently endorsed 14 patient safety measures focused on reducing complications such as medication errors, wrong-site surgery and patient burns, the nonprofit organization announced.
NQF reviewed 27 measures and endorsed 14 of them for at least three years, with ongoing evaluation and updating. It left three patient-safety measures under consideration.
“Improving patient safety is a cornerstone of NQF’s mission to advance healthcare quality,” said Janet Corrigan, PhD, MBA, president and CEO of NQF. “We are proud to endorse this set of measures that will be vital in helping providers protect patients from harm and deliver safer, high-quality care.”
“Preventable errors in healthcare are costing Americans in a number of ways, whether in premiums, lost work time and wages or undue stress and anxiety for patients and families,” Detroit’s Henry Ford Health System Senior Vice President and Chief Quality Officer William A. Conway said in a statement. “This measure set will ensure the healthcare community has the right measurement tools to help alleviate these burdens and provide patients with high-quality care.”
The measures include only those that have been endorsed for at least three years and are now undergoing NQF endorsement maintenance. The ongoing evaluation and updating of endorsed measures ensures they are current and relevant to NQF’s patient safety portfolio.
“These measures are an important part of the NQF measure portfolio,” said Pamela Cipriano, PhD, RN, senior director at Galloway Consulting and co-chair of the Patient Safety Measures steering committee. “They help providers examine adverse events and increase accountability to implement improvements that will protect patients and enable the safe, high-quality, and compassionate care they deserve.”
To keep patients safe from medical complications, hospitals can launch programs that improve physician-nurse communication and teamwork to reduce surgery-related blood clots and infections or achieve physician buy-in for checklists and standardized procedures to prevent wrong-site surgeries.
Patient safety has been in the news a lot lately, with hospitals getting–and disputing–new safety report cards from the Leapfrog Group earlier this month.
Back in April, the NQF endorsed two new measures for all-cause unplanned readmissions, despite provider criticism of using national measures of readmissions as a quality indicator. NQF said those measures account for multiple factors that affect readmissions, including the complexity of the medical condition, effectiveness of inpatient treatment and care transitions, patient adherence to treatment plans and patient health literacy, FierceHealthcare previously reported.