HHS Director Praises UHS Hospitals Safety Model

GREENVILLE, N.C. - A national campaign to minimize mistakes at the hospital that can sometimes be deadly reached Eastern North Carolina Monday.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius came here to push the federal government's Partnership for Patients program.  Something needs to be done after a recent study found something goes wrong to one in three patients at a hospital.  Kathleen Sebelius came to University Health Systems and Pitt County Memorial Hospital to see what's being done right.

The Health and Human Services Secretary walked through the cardiac intensive care unit met a patient, doctors, nurses and managers.  One nurse explained how her department hasn’t had a central line infection for 600 days.

“Wow,” said Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

She came to the hospital to figure out how to copy a program that claims a 50 percent reduction in hospital infections over two years.

"Everybody is being held accountable.  Everybody is being measured.  Everybody knows what the other one is doing and they're sharing information," Sebelius said.

University Health Systems hangs that information on the walls detailing how long it's been since patients have fallen or been infected during their hospital stay.  It's transparency that admits mistakes and provides a sort of peer pressure to do better.

"Humans make errors,” said Joan Wynn, the Chief Quality Officer for University Health Systems.  “That's how we're made and so human error is a part of everything in life and our goal is to keep those human errors from reaching the patients and causing harm."

The simplest way is hygiene.  In the cardiac unit, soap canisters hang inside and outside every room.  There's a “wash in wash out” policy for anyone seeing a patient to fight infections and the staff keeps tabs on each other.

"We have gone to being proactive instead of reactive," said Tim Weatherington, a nurse in the cardiac intensive care unit.

Patients and their families also get a say.  They told Sebelius at a roundtable how a patient advisory board brought changes that improved the quality of their care.  All of this is information Sebelius says can be used in other hospitals across the country.

"You need dedicated leaders who are all about zero harm to patients,” Sebelius said.  “That sounds simple, but it really isn't.”

The Partnership for Patients is a billion-dollar program that kicked off last month.  It involves 500 hospitals with the goal to cut medical mistakes and hospital readmissions because of those mistakes.  Sebelius says it could save $35 billion in three years and save Medicare $50 billion over ten years.  University Health Systems is a partner in the program.  There's no breakdown yet about how much of that billion dollars it will get.

 ---Prior Story---

GREENVILLE, N.C. - One of the things last year's health care reform law did was put more emphasis on patient safety.

It changes the payment system to give hospitals incentives to eliminate medical mistakes.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says one healthcare provider in eastern Carolina is on the right track.

Kathleen Sebelius spent a couple of hours here today going over the Partnership for Patients program.

She took a tour of the cardiology intensive care at the Heart Institute to see what's being done to improve patient care, specifically to reduce patient injuries and infections while hospitalized.

The government's investing a billion dollars in 1,500 hospitals nationwide, including University Health Systems to eliminate those kinds of mishaps and potentially save billions more in healthcare costs down the road.

One goal is to cut hospital acquired infections by 40% in two years.

Secretary Sebelius said that's not enough, "Have the goal be not we're gonna reduce by 50% or 60% or 70%, but zero.  We want zero errors to occur. That goal should be the goal for patients across the country."

A study published last month found some kind of medical mistake happens to one of every three patients admitted to a hospital.

That's what's got to change.

Tonight at 11, we'll go over some of the steps taken here to cut that number.