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Hadassah Center 

for

Clinical Quality & Safety

 

For the Hebrew Website

 

 

 

About Us 

 

 

 

In recent years, quality and safety in patient healthcare has become an important professional and academic field, involving practical scientific research with far-reaching implications in the areas of organization of the workplace, medical education and legislation.  In 2002, Prof. Shlomo Mor-Yosef, the Director-General of the Hadassah Medical Organization, established a hospital committee for clinical quality improvement and error prevention.  This committee serves as a quality control unit as defined in the Patients’ Rights Law.  Its principal function is to encourage and initiate measurement of clinical quality parameters in hospital departments, under the supervision of the department chairman; with the cooperation of doctors and nurses as well as medical, public health and nursing students (as a final paper or thesis project).  The committee's long-term goal is to alter the organizational culture, leading to the routine measuring of quality indicators.

 

In March 2003, due to the large backlog of projects, the Center for Clinical Quality and Safety was established to assist the committee in its endeavors.  The Center was asked to develop new methods for evaluating and improving clinical performance, using instruments of industrial (of the statistical-process-control type), communication and organizational psychology.

 

In its six years of activity, many projects involving clinical quality & safety have been completed, and numerous projects are currently being conducted at both Hadassah hospitals. Some areas indicate the need for improvement.  

 

 

Our Center's main areas of project activity are:

·        The Emergency Room

·        Departments of Medicine

·        Departments of Surgery

·        Obstetrics and Gynecology

·        Radiology

·        Cross-institutional projects

·        Projects involving quality outside Hadassah, health promotion or decision analysis

 

Our most recently completed and current projects at Hadassah include:

·        Catheter-related Bloodstream Infections: 62% Rate Reduction After an Intervention

·        Monitoring of Surgical Infections

·        Is Weaning from Mechanical Ventilation in Non-ICU Admission Wards Optimal Under Existing Circumstances?

·        Quality of Elective Inguinal Hernia Repair

·        Patient Satisfaction with Breast Reconstruction: Does it Correlate with Objective Outcomes? 

·        Quality of Care in Penetrating Keratoplasty Procedures

·        Quality of Lasik Procedure

·        Quality of Snoring Management

·        Quality of Emergency Medicine

 

The findings of several of our projects were presented at the Hadassah Quarterly Board Meeting on September 14, 2008.

September 2008 Presentation to Board

 

Other activities of our Center include workshops, presentations and publications at national and international forums.

 

At the 2007 meeting of the Israeli Society for Quality in Medicine, five abstracts and eight posters were presented. Our Center was awarded first and second place for two of our posters.

 

In June, 2006, our Center conducted a seminar on the patients' right law and end-of-life decision-making.  The following November, we offered a two-week course on palliative care.

 

Coumadin instruction kits for both patients and their family physicians, the first of its kind in Israel, was developed by our Center.  Hadassah's patients are responding enthusiastically to the new coumadin kits and Israel's medical community has been positively impressed.  Some of the HMOs, such as Leumit, have started using the kits for their patients.

 

In conclusion, although our Center consists of a small team, we have conducted and continue to conduct many diverse projects in our attempt to make healthcare at Hadassah more patient-centered, more evidence-based and more system-minded.  Increasing accountability by department heads for quality and safety may be a key to further successes in the field.  

 

We also serve as advisors to students from the Faculty of Medicine on projects involving clinical quality. 

 

More information on our Center and its projects and activities, both in English and in Hebrew, can be found in the various sections of this website.

 

 

 

MB


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