Posted by John Bae, MD*
11th Annual Duke Health Patient Safety and Quality Conference
Duke Health ushered in a new decade of quality and safety with the 11th Annual Patient Safety and Quality Conference this past week at the convention center in downtown Durham. As a testimony to the continued growth of quality and safety at Duke, this was the largest conference ever with close to 600 in attendance from across the organization, representing all three hospitals (DUH, DRH, DRAH) as well as Duke Primary Care, Duke Lifepoint, Duke HomeCare and Hospice, and the PDC.
Welcome messages were provided by Dr. Eugene Washington, Chancellor for Health Affairs, and Dr. William Fulkerson, Executive Vice President for DUHS. Both leaders echoed the importance of quality and safety as part of our Duke Health’s key priority and celebrated the last year in quality, led by those in attendance. The plenary speaker was Dr. Terry Fairbanks, the Director of the National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare. Dr. Fairbanks espoused a message encouraging all in attendance to shift focus the understanding the processes of care delivery to improve quality and decrease patient harm.
Posters and Awards
The conference was also a time to celebrate quality and safety work and there were 75 posters on display. Duke Hospital Medicine programs were well represented with 9 posters presented by Adia Ross, Pooh Setji, George Cheely, Poonam Sharma, Alan Tesson, Steve Telloni, Aparna Kamath, Cara O’brien, and myself. Pooh Setji and Adia Ross’s poster “A Full House: Re-Shuffling Our Transfer Strategy to Better Manage Capacity Across Duke Hospitals” won best poster in the “Timely” category and my poster “Reviewing Deaths to Save Lives: A Standardized Approach to Mortality Review” won the Karcher Award for Safety.
Breakout Sessions
The afternoon was filled with a number of breakout sessions including a focus on improving resiliency, increasing patient engagement, moving toward high reliability, and eliminating healthcare associated infections. From hospital medicine, Dr. Brian Griffith sat on a panel entitled “Looking in the Mirror: How Quality Processes Impact our Reflection of Care to the World” and I presented work on mortality.
All told, it was an inspiring day in quality and we look forward to the next 10 years of quality at Duke Health.
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*John Bae, MD is Assistant Professor of Medicine and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Duke
Follow him on twitter @JonBae01