Patient Safety Committee

Charge: The Minnesota Hospital Association Patient Safety Committee is charged with improving and enhancing patient safety in all aspects of care delivery and strengthening public trust. The committee improves patient safety by developing and standardizing patient safety policies, developing tools for leadership, management, and staff, and providing a forum to share successful patient safety strategies. The committee collaborates with the Minnesota Alliance for Patients Safety (MAPS), Safest in America and others. It serves as a conduit of patient safety information for all MHA member facilities and takes a leadership role with patient safety in the state.

Chair: Dr. Steven Mulder, Hutchinson Area Health Care

Achievements:

• The state's new adverse event reporting system was supported by an MHA patient safety task force. Work is now going on to review adverse health event data to identify safety alerts, develop action plans and to further refine how the reportable events are defined.
• Work done to develop and champion a model full disclosure policy has resulted in hospitals throughout the state committing to and developing policies to proactively communicate with patients and families when unanticipated outcomes occur.
• A safety assessment guide was developed for hospital leadership, trustees and patient safety managers to use to create, evaluate and advance their patient safety agendas.
• The committee has developed and disseminated other resources. These include 1) a resource promoting just cultures in health care that focus on sharing learnings when errors occur, 2) consumer tips, and 3) material to help hospitals perform root cause analyses and develop action plans to prevent safety events.

MHA Patient Safety Committee Subgroups

MHA Registry Advisory Council
Charge: The council serves as the peer review group that establishes recommendations for MHA on the management of data related to the safety of care in member hospitals.

Safe Hospital Work Group
Charge: This work group considers what patient safety efforts should be undertaken to increase the safety of hospital outcomes and reduce patient harm. The group is addressing the questions of whether care is becoming safer and how hospitals can collaboratively advance safety efforts.

Pediatric Falls Prevention Work Group
This short-term work group focuses on pediatric falls prevention and strategies.