The Quality and Safety Institute partners with care teams, leadership and programs throughout the Rochester Regional Health footprint to lead system-wide initiatives that ensure compliant, high-quality and safe care. These initiatives include:
Working with members of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Office, the Quality and Safety Institute is focused on ensuring that all patients receive the best possible care, regardless of their race, ethnicity, identity or primary language.
Learn more about Rochester Regional’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that, on any given day in the United States, about one in 25 hospital patients has at least one healthcare-associated infection. Preventing these infections is a key priority for ensuring the safety of our patients and the primary goal of our Infection Prevention Program.
We’re taking steps to prevent healthcare-associated infections by:
Hand hygiene is cleansing your hands using either soap and water or hand sanitizer. Using effective hand hygiene is one of the most effective ways to prevent the spread of infection.
Our teams make sure to cleanse their hands every time:
We have taken an active role in our community, among our employees and for patients and visitors throughout our system in educating and providing equipment to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Measures we are taking include:
Infection Prevention partners closely with Clinical providers, Nursing, and other healthcare teams to assure we are reducing the risk of central line associated bloodstream infections, catheter associated Urinary tract infections, C. difficile infections, and surgical site infections. These efforts focus on assuring we consistently and completely follow nationally-recognized best practices for managing patients with these risk factors for infections.
Partnering with our colleagues in Information Security and Technology, the Quality and Safety Institute works across the Rochester Regional Health system to address concerns and areas for optimization within our electronic health records. Examples of programs we’ve worked on include improvements in patient identification and outpatient prescription tracking.
A fall is a sudden, unintentional descent, with or without injury to the patient, that results in the patient coming to rest on the floor, on or against some other surface (e.g. counter) on another person, or on an object (e.g. trash can).
Each year, more than 1 million people fall while in the hospital. Falls can increase healthcare costs, the length of stay and a higher rate of transfer to nursing homes. One-third of the falls can be prevented and we’re committed to doing our part.
What we’re doing:
While medical errors and harm while in the hospital can and do happen across the country, many of these errors are preventable and avoidable. At all Rochester Regional Health facilities, we make every effort to ensure these events never occur.
When a mistake happens, we have specific methods in place to gather, analyze, track and trend incident data and near misses so that we can learn from these events and help to reduce adverse outcomes in the future.
Our culture encourages all staff members to report any patient safety concerns that they may have. Our goal is to eliminate possible preventable harms before they happen and to share learnings throughout the organization.
We also have 400 safety champions across Rochester Regional Health – these team members are catalysts of change who serve as resources for their departments to improve, strengthen and sustain our culture of safety.