"The Mission of the Tri-Cities patient safety coalition is to advance the progress of patient safety in our community by collaborating as healthcare institutions, community leaders and specialists."
Tri-Cities Patient Safety Coalition
The Tri-Cities Patient Safety Coalition (TCPSC) was formed in 2005 after the three local hospitals (Kadlec Medical Center, Kennewick General Hospital and Lourdes Health Network) successfully collaborated for three years with Battelle Memorial Institute on performing failure assessments of healthcare systems. These first Failure Mode and Effects Analyses (FMEA) dealt with issues such as medication delivery, wrong site surgery and blood transfusions. Since that time, the Coalition has continued to address additional patient safety concerns.
The TCPSC has:
- Collaborated on developing a Medication Reconciliation policy/procedures.
Download "Mind Your Medicines" and record your prescriptions, over-the-counter medicines and dietary supplements on one easy to use form. - Shared information, insights and resources regarding formation of Rapid Response teams, which has been implemented by Kadlec Medical Center, Kennewick General Hospital and Lourdes Health Network.
- Standardized and improved Critical Results Notification criteria, policy and procedure for use by all three hospitals and Tri-Cities Laboratory (TCL).
- Collaborated in performing proactive risk assessment on seven high risk hospital processes (e.g. medication delivery, fall prevention, blood transfusion).
- Published risk assessment success in the March, 2005 issue of "Joint Commission Journal of Quality and Patient Safety."
- Created a Tri-Cities Patient Safety Coalition (www.tcpsc.org) website.
Current Projects:
- Standardization of naming convention for Emergency Codes.
- Standardization of color-coded patient wristbands.
- Inter-hospital FMEA of patient transfers (improvement of hand-off procedures).
- Distribution of Medication List Cards to community.
- Creation of a voluntary online secure site to store medical information (e.g. medical history, medication list).
