The National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) has urged stakeholders to be united in safety for Patient Safety Awareness Week, March 8-14, 2015.
This year’s theme, United in Safety, underscores the fact that everyone has a role to play in ensuring safe care, and that with partnerships comes progress.
The campaign is supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The Moore Foundation’s patient care program is focused on improving the experience and outcomes in patient care, and a key area of its work includes partnering with patients and their families to improve how care is delivered.
One of the foundation’s newer efforts, ‘Roadmap for Patient and Family Engagement in Healthcare’, is among the resources that will be highlighted during the campaign. The roadmap was designed to increase patient and family engagement by providing specific strategies to be applied across the continuum of care.
“Currently, meaningful patient and family engagement is the exception, not the rule, in our health system and we want to see this changed,” said Dominick Frosch, a Fellow in the Moore Foundation’s patient care program who helped design the roadmap.
“Patient Safety Awareness Week serves as an important reminder and calling card to take action to both increase and improve efforts to partner with patients and their families to receive safer and more compassionate care in all health settings.”
According to a 2014 report from the NPSF Lucian Leape Institute, research and practice have shown that patient and family engagement can contribute to safer health care through improved outcomes, better patient experience of care, and better working experience for health professionals.
The NPSF said that by focusing on this topic, it seeks to continue the national conversation about barriers to engagement, while sharing resources and materials designed to improve and enhance engagement of patients, families, and the general public.
“NPSF is extremely grateful to the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for its support of this year’s Patient Safety Awareness Week campaign,” said Tejal Gandhi, president and chief executive officer of NPSF. “This is what our theme, United in Safety, is all about—recognizing where goals align and creating partnerships that help advance the work necessary to truly make health care safer for patients and the workforce.”
NPSF, Patient Safety Awareness Week, Risk Management, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Dominick Frosch, Tejal Gandhi, US
