Patient Safety Toolkit

Nothing is more foundational to our patients or to us as health care professionals than ensuring that patients receive safe care.

While many important steps have been taken to improve safety, and thousands of lives saved as a result, there are relatively few specific, proven tactics that can be quickly put into place to address the problem. This toolkit provides more than 30.

In this toolkit, we describe how specific, hardwired behaviors can be applied to patient safety. By using the same tools to improve patient safety that have already been proven to achieve clinical, operational and service excellence, your organization will save time, expenses, and most importantly, lives.

This toolkit provides practical tactics that will help you:

• Hardwire a culture of safety
• Improve the accuracy of patient identification
• Implement a standardized approach to "hand off" communications, including an opportunity to ask and respond to questions
• Comply with current CDC hand hygiene guidelines and reduce MRSA infection
• Reduce the risk of patient harm resulting from falls
• Encourage patients? active involvement in their own care as a patient safety strategy
• Prevent health care-associated pressure ulcers
• Reduce readmission and adverse events pos-discharge