AdventHealth Hospitals Win National Safety Award for Reducing Patient Falls
Hospital staff participating in the AdventHealth Patient Falls Bootcamp, a program that significantly reduced patient falls and enhanced safety.
ECRI, the nation’s largest independent nonprofit patient safety organization (PSO), names AdventHealth Zephyrhills and AdventHealth Dade City hospitals in Pasco County, FL, winners of the 2023 Safety Excellence Award.
AdventHealth received the award for launching a Patient Falls Bootcamp that reduced incidents of patients falling by 33 percent overall, with some hospital units improving as much as 40 to 50 percent over the previous year.
Each year in the United States, between 700,000 and 1,000,000 people fall in hospitals, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Many of these falls result in severe harm or even death.
The annual Safety Excellence Award recognizes outstanding patient safety initiatives led by PSOs that partner with ECRI, and members of ECRI and the ISMP PSO. The winning submission was selected based on a blinded panel review of four key criteria: impact, culture of safety, scale, and innovation.
“We applaud AdventHealth Zephyrhills and AdventHealth Dade City hospitals for successfully tackling a perennial issue in healthcare: fall prevention,” says Dheerendra Kommala, MD, chief medical officer, ECRI. “The bootcamp has proven to be a powerful intervention that not only enhanced patient safety, but also helped to foster a sustained culture of patient fall prevention. ECRI is proud to support AdventHealth’s ongoing commitment to excellence in safety and quality.”
The AdventHealth Patient Falls Bootcamp helped frontline hospital staff identify safety hazards, recognize the characteristics of a high-risk patient, and ensure fall risk strategies were in place. The bootcamp included education sessions on the use of gait belts, tips for conversations with patients, and guidance on implementing an early mobility program. AdventHealth credits ECRI’s guidance on high-risk patients, risk assessment questionnaires, and strategies to identify hazards as contributing factors to the program’s success.
“The bootcamp shook up the traditional approach to strategy sessions by incorporating high-energy activities that immersed participants in a new way of thinking,” says Peggy Maguire, the director of risk management for both AdventHealth Zephyrhills and AdventHealth Dade City. “The concept of a bootcamp incorporates intensive training designed to rapidly improve and significantly impact a metric. This award recognizes the cultural transformation that was ignited and sustained across both hospitals as a result.”
The AdventHealth PSO is one of several PSOs that partner with ECRI. The 2023 Safety Excellence Award ceremony was held virtually on November 1, 2023, as part of ECRI and the ISMP PSO’s Annual Meeting.
ECRI and the ISMP PSO maintain the largest patient safety reporting and learning system—collecting and analyzing more than five million patient safety events across 90 percent of the United States. To learn more about ECRI and the ISMP PSO, or the Safety Excellence Award, visit www.ecri.org/pso, call (610) 825-6000, or e-mail clientservices@ecri.org.
