Lurie Children’s Hospital details surgical safety breakthrough

Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago announced that is has achieved “more than a 13-fold improvement in surgical safety” after implementing a series of interventions based on high reliability principles across its ORs.

The hospital said it has been experiencing a serious safety event approximately every 2,977 surgical cases before the implementation. It has now performed 39,654 cases over 585 days “without a single serious safety event.”

The hospital has published a study about the changes in Pediatrics.

“We are immensely proud of our entire team in the Department of Surgery for adopting key safety practices that resulted in this dramatic accomplishment, even as our surgical cases increased,” said study co-author Thomas Inge, MD, PhD, surgeon-in-chief and chair of the Department of Surgery at Lurie Children’s, and professor of surgery and pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “There is very limited published evidence on system-level safety interventions specifically in pediatric perioperative settings—our study helps fill that gap.”

Here are the three main safety interventions that Lurie Children’s has implemented, and which senior author Derek Wheeler, MD, MMM, MBA, executive vice president and COO at Lurie Children’s, calls “practical, feasible, and replicable at other institutions”:

• Surgical safety stand-downs. “The Department of Surgery paused all non-essential operations for a dedicated hour, twice a year, to bring the entire perioperative team together to transparently review safety data, hear from a patient's family and reset expectations around safety culture.”
• Error prevention training. “Frontline staff were taught practical tools for speaking up, asking questions, focusing on details and communicating clearly. Mandatory education modules were completed by 87% of staff in the first year.”
• Safety coach program. “Frontline safety coaches were trained and embedded to provide real-time, peer-to-peer feedback and model safe practices in the operating rooms every day.”

“Essential to our success is our ongoing commitment to a culture of safety and continuous improvement,” said Dr. Wheeler. “Importantly, our study shows that safety reporting actually increased, which is a sign that people felt safer speaking up when they noticed something amiss, so that appropriate steps could be taken to achieve safe patient care.”

Access the full study here.