Healthcare Safety Toolkit Library

Responding to a disaster involves many challenges for healthcare facilities. Within this toolkit, you will find pieces that will make sure that your facility is prepared for any emergency it may face.

The environment of care in a healthcare organization consists of three elements:

The building or space, including how it is arranged and specific features to protect patients, staff and visitors.

Equipment used to support quality patient care or to safely operate the building or space.

Patient, staff, visitors and anyone else who enters the organization, all of whom have a role in minimizing risks.

Any healthcare organization, regardless of its size or location, faces risks in the environment of care area. Environmental risks occur in many areas, including safety and security, fire, infection control, hazardous materials and waste management, medical equipment management and utility systems management. Having standardized, hardwired best practices and processes in place can decrease environment of care risks and help your organization remain prepared for a regulatory survey. The resources available in this toolkit include tactics to proactively minimize risks to patients, staff and visitors from known hazards or risks that may exist in the physical environment or activities connected to its operations and/or properties.

A toolkit designed to provide the resources necessary to create an effective fall prevention program. From innovative ideas from other hospitals to information that guides the development of effective fall prevention programs, this toolkit offers patient risk assessments, staff educational materials and resources to help reduce patient falls and falls with injury.

Hospital-acquired infections cause thousands of preventative illnesses and deaths each year. This toolkit assists staff in preventing infections by practicing good hand hygiene. It includes an observation template, a training course, proper hand hygiene techniques and a self-assessment tool. It emphasizes the importance of simple interventions staff can utilize to keep their patients free from unnecessary infection.

The process of credentialing and privileging staff is one of the most important duties a healthcare organization undertakes. Through thorough vetting of a practitioner’s competence and qualifications, practitioners can increase the likelihood that their provided care will be of high quality and delivered in a safe manner. Without a sound system of credentialing in place, facility leaders place patient safety in jeopardy, increasing the potential for medical accidents and hospital liability.

Use the credentialing resources provided in this toolkit to ensure that your hospital or medical facility is properly vetting and assessing the level of skill and professionalism in your staff.

Patient safety is a priority in healthcare. This guide is to assist in promoting a highly reliable staff and maintain a culture of safety throughout the facility with tools to guide them including a video demonstration, education, monitoring assessments, podcasts, articles, webinars and numerous resources. This education, along with interventions, allows staff to provide reliable care to every patient while minimizing risks and placing safety first.

The Joint Commission's recent Sentinel Event Alert discusses the elimination of racial and ethnic disparities causing mortality and morbidity in pregnant and postpartum patients.

The Joint Commission's Quick Safety Newsletter: Issue 67, discusses how mental health conditions are the leading cause of pregnancy-related deaths.

AWHONN has adapted the SBAR tool to promote respectful and inclusive patient communication and care.

AWHONN has adapted the SBAR Tool to promote respectful and inclusive patient communication and care.

Link: https://www.awhonn.org/awhonn-sbars/

The Environmental Services department is exposed to many hazards related to lifting. This risk assessment is designed for the EVS Manager to do an evaluation of the department to identify common hazards against best practices related to safe lifting plans and hazard identification, job design, workplace practices, and training.

A comprehensive white paper to address Safe Patient Handling and Mobility from the perspective of technology, physical facility design and construction, and the business case for SPHM programs. This white paper is based on a wealth of research which recognizes the significant risks of manual patient handling to caregivers and to patients.

A worksheet, developed by the CDC, that can help an employer calculate the average cost of a sharp related injury. This type of worksheet can help build a campaign to obtain leadership commitment of the problem or it can be used as a PI tool.

Awareness and evaluation of the types of sharps within your organization and where these sharps are used can be helpful in implementing injury prevention plans.

Patient education is an important part of ensuring success with the plan of care. Including information on how to handle sharps and needles will help prevent injuries from occurring to patients or others if they are part of the home care plan.

Raising awareness of how to avoid injuries from needlesticks and sharps is an important step in prevention. Through employee education and visual reminders, your organization can help all employees both understand and prevent needlestick and sharp injures.

The additional online resources in this section provide information related to safe lifting best practices.

Evaluating proper lifting techniques and comparing them against safe lifting best practices is useful when trying to identify opportunities for improvement. Tools in this section are examples of tools that can be used to improve performance.