Funds for Safety Grant

2023 Funds for Safety Award Recipients

• Beauregard Health System – BCMA for Patient Safety

  Bar Code Medication Administration (BCMA) has been the documented standard of care for assuring patient safety and protection from nursing licensure. BCMA mandates that the administrator adheres to the 7 rights of medication administration. These rights reduce the opportunity for error and mandate the nurse follow built-in safety steps. The Beauregard Health Systems team has set out to provide their patients with an even greater level of safety by upgrading their medication administration equipment to meet the BCMA standard of care.
  
  
  Their goal is to provide a computer and scanner for each of their 28 inpatient unit beds. Their current equipment is mobile handheld systems that require Wi-Fi to operate. This drawback frequently leaves the healthcare staff with a loss of internet connection and difficulty when inputting vital patient information. The electronic data collection reports from these devices have been confirmed to be inaccurate making it impossible to determine human error versus reporting error when events occur.
  
  
  The recent installation of computers and corded scanners in their 6-bed Intensive Care Unit (ICU) has been a great patient safety success. The BCMA scanning rate is documented at 97% with most nurses scanning at 100% compliance. The electronic data collection reports are confirmed to be accurate. An accurate, well-functioning system, like the one in their ICU, is needed across the facility.

• Hood Memorial Hospital – Incident Reporting System Implementation

  A recent study revealed that medical errors claim approximately 250,000 lives per year, making it the third leading cause of death in the United States. One important step in preventing medical errors from recurring is timely notification and follow-up. That is why the Hood Memorial Hospital team is dedicated to making the method of reporting an incident quick and easy for staff.
  
  
  Their goal is to allow staff to submit efficient incident reports efficiently without disrupting their regular workflow. By implementing a standard reporting system, staff can submit timely notifications of incidents, submit anonymous event entries, contribute to robust information sharing among providers, and more. This new system implementation will also allow efficient reporting for employees of HMH and Amite Rural Health Clinic (ARHC) and timely notification to the leadership of any incidents entered.

• Lane Regional Medical Center – Regaining Effective Infection Control Practices Post Pandemic

  Infection Control has been a long-standing priority in healthcare. The COVID-19 pandemic brought about a heightened sense of awareness and healthcare providers made great strides to ensure infection prevention measures were always met. Now that the pandemic is trending downward, facilities are seeing a decrease in compliance with infection control practices.
  
  
  Lane Regional Medical Center has observed a decrease in hand hygiene compliance from 90% to about 85% as well as an increase in hospital-acquired infections. This project to regain effective infection control practices post-pandemic will redefine the policies and procedures needed to maintain a safe environment for both patients and staff.

• North Oaks Health System #1 – ED Stretchers for Patient Safety

  North Oaks Health System has made and continues to make significant investments in fall prevention technology. Their goal is to implement an integrated technology that will assist clinical staff with appropriate alerts for high-fall-risk patients. Currently, staff must use a separate pad with a separate alarm box, which is costly and requires separate preventative maintenance.
  
  
  Stretchers with integrated scales and 2-stage bed exit alarms will decrease patient safety events by monitoring pressure sensitivity from the moment the patient sits up to nearly exiting the bed. This advancement allows an alarm to be set specifically to the patient’s needs.

• Ochsner St. Martin Hospital – AvaSure Monitoring System

  More than 20 patient falls occurred in the inpatient unit at Ochsner St. Martin Hospital in 2022. The purchase and implementation of AvaSure visual monitoring devices will assist this facility’s staff in ensuring patient safety by monitoring high falls risk patients. Integrating AvaSure into the patient monitoring process will also reduce the professional and general liability risks associated with caring for a high falls risk patient.
  
  
  The monitoring technology allows for patients to be digitally monitored 24 hours a day and allows for verbal redirection when a patient is attempting to get up without assistance. The Ochsner St. Martin Hospital team plans to decrease the likelihood of high-risk patients attempting to get up without assistance thereby reducing patient falls.

• Pointe Coupee General Hospital – Decreasing Foley Catheter Utilization

  As a Joint Commission-accredited critical access hospital, Point Coupee General Hospital is committed to meeting the special healthcare needs of the rural community by providing the highest quality of care. Through their Emergency Department, they provided care for 13 patients with complaints of urinary retention in 2022. However, of those 13 patients, all of them required foley insertion due to the lack of a bladder scanner in the facility. Without the use of a bladder scanner, urinary retention is assessed by performing an invasive urinary catheterization. This process can be uncomfortable and pose a direct risk of introducing more pathogens into the bladder, increasing a patient’s risk of infection.
  
  Their goal is to reduce the need for unnecessary urinary catheterization by implementing bladder scanning technology in the Emergency Department. This will allow the Emergency Department nurses to perform pre- and post-void scans on patients at any time.

• Reeves Memorial – Improving Cardiac Diagnostic Processes

  Reeves Memorial Medical Center is a rural hospital that serves a wide variety of patients from pediatrics to geriatrics. They strive to provide excellent up-to-date healthcare with top-quality equipment. This is why they seek to integrate the MAC VE360 electrocardiogram machine into their Emergency Department to assist staff with identifying irregular heart rhythms. Having this information upon arrival will allow the Reeves Memorial team to identify the cause and diagnosis a patient quicker than the current time it takes them.
  
  Patients that present to the Emergency Department with cardiac symptoms or related problems should have an electrocardiogram within 10 minutes of arrival. As a 15-bed critical access hospital, it is important to have equipment that can increase the likelihood of a patient having a more favorable outcome after experiencing cardiac symptoms.

• Richardson Medical Center – Improved Women’s Health Services

  As the only women’s health clinic in its parish, Richardson Medical Center’s women’s health clinic has had exponential growth since opening in 2019. However, this great volume has resulted in appointment wait times of around 90 days. With limited funding and outdated equipment, the likelihood of delayed sickness detection and poor patient outcomes due to that delay continues to increase.
  
  By replacing its outdated colposcope with new top-of-the-line technology, Richardson Medical will increase access to care for women in a high-poverty area. Richardson Medical Center is devoted to improving patient outcomes by increasing access to early women’s health cancer screening and detection.

• St. James Parish Hospital – Surgical Instrument Processing-RO Water System

  Water quality is an important consideration in all stages of reusable medical device reprocessing. Water impurities can jeopardize patient health, decrease decontamination effectiveness, and shorten the useful life of instrumentation and sterile processing equipment. After several months of investigating measures to improve the facility’s water quality, St. James Parish Hospital has recognized the need for an upgraded central sterile water system.
  
  These systems are designed to meet or exceed the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) standards and improve process water used to prevent infections, protect equipment, and improve patient outcomes. When implemented, the water systems eliminate up to 99% of total dissolved solids, volatile organic compounds, water hardness, and chlorine additives.

• Terrebonne General Health System #2 – Infant Warmers with Thermoregulation

  Terrebonne General Health System’s mission is to provide exceptional healthcare with compassion. That is why their Women’s Services Level III NICU and Nursey Department have set out to improve the equipment that services infant patients to offer a higher level of phototherapy care.
  
  Current technology at Terrebonne General does not ensure infants remain at an optimal temperature and offers healthcare staff no additional support to staff while they conduct necessary direct observations. This triggers a delay in care while providers gather additional equipment. An upgrade in technology would allow providers to respond to patient needs quickly and efficiently.

• Trinity Medical – “STAY” Safe Project

  Over the past four years, Trinity Medical has experienced a number of patient elopements. This unfortunate truth bought about a need to increase patient safety with a focus on high-risk patients admitted to the Emergency Department where most of the elopements have occurred.
  
  Trinity Medical’s 2023 safety project “STAY Safe!” focuses on keeping highly vulnerable Emergency Department patients safe and works to prevent them from eloping. They will accomplish this by utilizing a patient wandering system by Accutech Wander Management System to mitigate patient elopements from the ED.

• Union General Hospital – Ventilators for Patient Safety

  Patient safety in Union General Hospital is as important as providing treatments and urgent healthcare. So much so that they have prioritized improving the reliability of clinical care practices for ventilated patients. By replacing outdated ventilators with the latest technology, Union General Hospital will improve patient safety during intrahospital transportation of mechanically ventilated patients.

• West Feliciana Hospital – Press for Powerlifting

  Using their current manual stretcher system, West Feliciana Hospital EMS loads patients on stretchers by hand and then manually loads them into an ambulance. This process leads to multiple points where the patient can be dropped, handled roughly, or a stretcher malfunction could occur.
  
  West Feliciana Hospital’s goal is to decrease patient injuries and “near misses” due to inadequate equipment or employee physical limitations. With the implementation of the Press for Powerlifting Program, West Feliciana Hospital expects to reduce patient drops and injuries during EMS transport to zero.
  
  The benefits of implementing this new technology are multi-layered and include a decrease in employee injuries from loading patients into the ambulance and transporting them to the hospital.

• Woman’s Hospital – Fall Assessment & Risk Reduction

  From birth to mammography, from cancer care to surgery, Woman’s Hospital is dedicated to being a resource for exceptional care for women and babies. They highly prioritize being equipped to handle the expected as well as the unexpected. So much so that they have committed to the development and implementation of a Fall Risk Assessment and Reduction Program to complement their cancer survivorship services.
  
  This program would be available to any Woman’s patient receiving neurotoxic chemotherapy as part of their treatment program. Since imbalance and potential falls are side effects of chemotherapy, this program will reduce incidences of patient falls along the entire spectrum pf their cancer survivorship.