Celebrating National Patient Safety Awareness Week

In recognition of Patient Safety Awareness Week, celebrated March 14 to 20, Consulate Health Care would like to recognize the importance of providing a safe environment while offering excellent health and wellness services. Annually, we use these dates to help raise awareness of the issue of patient safety. By implementing updated guidelines to minimize safety risks, we constantly monitor our current plans while striving to be industry-reference for patient safety.

“Patient Safety is such an integral part of providing health care services that you can’t undertake one without incorporating the other,” said Lori Pearson, Vice President of Risk Management. Lori is an essential part of our team in creating and monitoring current safety plans and best practices in the industry. She explained the Consulate’s process of ensuring safety is an integral part of offering our patients and residents the best services.

With the COVID-19 pandemic being the main topic of concern for the past year, our teams across the different care centers worked together with leaders and staff with direct patient-contact to establish and effect safety plans. Consulate built a COVID-19 management strategy distributed across the different regions and divisions with open and direct communication. With our patients’ and staff’s safety as our number one priority, our strategy focused on minimizing risks in every step of our patient’s health care journey.

In her role leading the Risk Management department, Lori talked about the importance of safety and her work to guarantee we are always minimizing safety risks:

“In our environment, the concept of Patient-Centered Care is unique, in that our residents and patients may have different objectives for their journey home. In some respects, then, the standard for quality can be somewhat subjective, at least as it aligns itself with meeting individual patient expectations. But with patient safety, there’s an objective standard for Zero Harm – and that’s our goal.

At Consulate, we’re proudly on The Journey to Become a High Reliability Organization – a HiRO – meaning we have a goal of Zero Harm. This starts with recognizing there are two paths at every single opportunity – and we have to take both tracks. First, we must take a look at every safety event and determine how to prevent reoccurrence. However, second, we must look at processes that, even when implemented with complete accuracy, could be adjusted to reduce the likelihood of even having a safety event in the first place. That’s our real objective. How do we accomplish that? By competing with ourselves! We gather data as a measurement of the process, assess the data, set a goal, develop a plan, implement the plan, and then gather data to measure again. It’s a perpetual cycle. We also adopted a Safety Culture that allows and encourages any person to intervene in any circumstance to promote safety.

Safety isn’t something that can be assigned or delegated; it’s a culture of equal desire and accountability, and when we embrace the notion that we’re all there to look out for each other in the best interest of those we care for. Our number one priority is that our residents will not only be safe, but they will also feel safe on their health care journey.”