Teaming up with top hospitals and health systems across the country to use new methods to find the causes of and put a stop to dangerous and potentially deadly breakdowns in patient care, the Joint Commission is launching the Center for Transforming Healthcare. The Center’s first initiative is tackling handwashing failures that contribute to healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) that kill nearly 100,000 Americans each year and cost U.S. hospitals $4 billion to $29 billion annually to combat.
Eight leading hospitals and health systems volunteered to address hand washing failures as a critical patient safety problem–one that requires fixes far more complex than just putting up signs urging caregivers to wash their hands. Participants in the Center’s first project to make care safer by being more reliable are:
•Cedars-Sinai Health System, Los Angeles, Calif.
•Exempla Lutheran Medical Center, Wheat Ridge, Colo.
•Froedtert Hospital, Milwaukee, Wis.
•The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System, Baltimore, Md.
•Memorial Hermann Health Care System, Houston, Texas
•Trinity Health, Novi, Mich.
•Virtua, Marlton, N.J.
•Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, Winston-Salem, North Carolina
“Demanding that healthcare workers try harder is not the answer,” says Mark R. Chassin, MD, MPP, MPH, president of the Joint Commission.”These healthcare organizations have the courage to step forward to tackle the problem of handwashing by digging deep to find out where the breakdowns take place so we can create targeted solutions that will work now and keep working in the future. A comprehensive approach is the only solution to preventing bad patient outcomes.”
