At Kettering Health, our commitment to our patients starts with keeping them safe. We’re dedicated to a culture of safety that aims for zero harm. By building and improving this culture, we work to prevent errors, enhance quality, and support the well-being of both our patients and staff at every level.

In a strong culture of safety, teams consistently practice behaviors that reinforce and uphold it. This includes:

• Recognizing that healthcare is a high-risk job and staying focused on keeping everyone safe every day.
• Creating a space where staff can speak up about mistakes or close calls without worrying about getting in trouble.
• Working together, no matter your role or department, to find and fix safety issues.
• Making sure we have the tools and support needed to keep safety a top priority.

Teams can help Kettering Health keep our commitment to our patients by sharing feedback through the employee engagement and safety survey coming in September, and by regularly reporting safety concerns in SAFE.

Safety behaviors and processes

Kettering Health has five safety behaviors that help us protect our patients:

• Pay attention to detail
• Communicate clearly
• Have a questioning attitude
• Operate as a team
• Speak up for safety

Setting clear expectations is an essential part of creating a safe environment. In Q4, we’ll introduce tools to help us all understand and model the safety behaviors mentioned above.

In addition to safety behaviors, we also have specific processes and procedures designed to keep our patients safe. A few examples include medication safety (barcode scanning and medication 5 rights), hand hygiene, two-patient identification, and purposeful hourly rounding.

Safety Stand Down

In May, Kettering Health hosted its first system-wide Safety Stand Down, with the conversation focusing on wrong site/wrong procedures. Analysis of prior wrong site/wrong procedure cases showed the greatest opportunity was with informed consent, site marking, and timeout processes. With that in mind, during the Safety Stand Down, clinical staff and providers gathered with their departments to provide feedback and hear how issues can be prevented modeling the safety behavior of speak up for safety and following processes like site marking and proper timeouts.

In Q4, Kettering Health will host another Safety Stand Down across the organization, this time focusing on proper patient identification (two-patient ID) and how we refer to our patients when speaking to team members. We’ll discuss how our safety behavior of pay attention to detail is connected with these important processes.