Spearheaded by the National Patient Safety Foundation, Patient Safety Awareness Week (PSAW) is a national education and awareness-building campaign for improving patient safety at the local level. This year’s theme is: Let's talk! Healthy conversations for safer health care.
As we serve 9.6 million TRICARE beneficiaries, it’s up to us, the Department of Defense (DoD) Patient Safety Program (PSP), to help keep the conversation going on the MHS side. How do we do that? Teamwork. Collaboration. Creativity. We have to continue fostering a culture of teamwork and learn more about the ways we can enhance patient safety.
From March 7 – 13, the DoD PSP will once again support PSAW with a variety of activities and events highlighting the importance of patient safety, while showcasing some of the numerous patient safety success stories.
How do we use healthy conversations for safer health care? The DoD PSP fosters a culture of trust and transparency through communication, coordination and teamwork. We provide tools designed to continue to improve the safe delivery of care to our beneficiaries, such as our Patient Safety Learning Center (PSLC), a member-based community wiki that enables DoD personnel to access and contribute lessons learned, best practices, tools and resources, news articles, community events, and much more.
Our TeamSTEPPS system improves communication and other teamwork skills among health care providers who reliably deliver safe, high quality care. With ready-to-use materials and training curricula, TeamSTEPPS improves patient safety and quality healthcare through spread, impact and sustainment.
And the new DoD Patient Safety Reporting System (PSR) is a Web-based tool that will enable enterprise-wide reporting of both medication and non-medication-related patient safety events, including near misses. An anonymous, secure confidential and easily-accessible online tool, the PSR will help foster conversations around safety trends and how to improve care.
Patient safety is a shared responsibility that hinges on communication and collaboration. During this week, the DoD PSP will share examples of DoD leaders and health care providers who have embraced and implemented the patient safety culture and will highlight our products and services that help this happen.
To learn more about our programs and services, please contact us or visit our Web site.
For more information about National Patient Safety Awareness Week, visit the National Patient Safety Foundation.