CENTER FOR PATIENT SAFETY

The Center for Patient Safety is reducing preventable harm by offering culture and patient safety education as well as patient safety organization (PSO) services. Our goal is to reach healthcare providers in organizations throughout the care continuum with valuable and simplified resources and tools to improve patient safety. Far too many patients are injured, or even killed, during general healthcare practices. By collecting information on mistakes that occur, and aggregating the information with as many participating organizations as we can, we are able to learn why mistakes are occurring, and work to prevent them from occurring again. By learning from actual mistakes, we can save lives throughout the healthcare system.

Through webinars, onsite education and contracted services, the Center is able to educate providers and organizational leaders in the meaningful opportunities that patient safety culture can offer, including long-term organizational sustainability which contributes to community strength and economic growth. When culture improves, so to does employee engagement which improves retention and leads to better patient care.

The Center is comprised of a multidisciplinary team of patient safety experts, dedicated to reducing preventable harm. Team members have additional expertise including trainers for Just Culture and TeamSTEPPS, Malcolm Baldrige examiners, and more.

We were one of the first PSOs in the country and have since become one of the oldest, largest, most active, and most diverse PSOs in the country. Regulated by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) under the federal department of health, the Center is positioned with hundreds of organizations as experience to support continued growth.

As a provider of patient safety culture survey services, the Center has been administering AHRQ's surveys on patient safety(TM) since 2010. Additionally, the Center has developed two additional surveys to fill gaps that existed in measuring patient safety culture for emergency medical services (EMS) air and ground, and home health.

The Center has changed significantly over the last few years, moving from an almost strictly grant-based organization, to a multi-contract, multi-service consulting and training organization. Education, training and speaking engagements have resulted in more awareness of the patient safety gaps in healthcare. We have also realized the need for more education and sharing worldwide.

The Center (working with only providers in Missouri until 2012) now works with clients in every state in the United States and has followers worldwide. We work with some of the largest and smallest organizations in the country, reflecting our ability to be effective at all levels and with all sizes of organizations.

Supplemental funding from grants and donations allow us to make our services affordable for small, rural organizations.

The Center has recently developed an exclusive hands-on workshop that begins the foundation of education on culture and leadership support to reach high reliability. Students leave at the end of the day with a workbook uniquely designed around their own organization and it is a start to a customized patient safety program.