This series of easy-to-consume virtual webinars will highlight emerging patient safety trends and issues of critical need in the Emergency Department. The webinars will identify innovative strategies and implementation techniques to support ED teams in meeting their quality and safety goals and harm reduction.
Safety Series webinars are held from 12:00 – 1:00 pm EST and are FREE for MPSC Members. Registration fee for Non-members is $45.
Safe Tables are a shared learning forum for peers to exchange patient safety experiences, discuss best practices, network and learn from each other in an open, uninhibited and legally protected environment.
Safe Tables are open and FREE to MPSC members only and are held in-person from 1:00 – 3:00pm EST.
Many healthcare professionals, particularly quality and safety leaders, use a variety of patient safety tools and techniques daily to ensure the delivery of highly-reliable care; but these tools also offer implementable, effective, and practical applications for front-line healthcare workers to improve patient safety systems and processes.
Patient Safety Tools courses are held virtually from 12:00 – 2:00 pm EST and are FREE to MPSC Members. Registration fee for Non-members is $79.
Violence in emergency departments has reached epidemic levels and emergency department staff are particularly vulnerable. The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) believes that optimal patient care can be achieved only when patients, healthcare workers and all other persons in the ED are protected against violent acts occurring within the department. As such, ACEP advocates for increased awareness of violence against healthcare workers in the ED and for increased safety measures in all EDs. This one-hour webinar will focus on the recognition, management, and mitigation of workplace violence. Participants will learn special security needs based on identified risks for the ED, including trauma-level designation, volume, types of patients treated, incident activity and community demographics.
Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is a prospective, team based, structured process used to identify system failures of high risk processes before they occur. The ED’s processes should be analyzed for its inherent risks using FMEA. This two-hour virtual course will provide tools to apply FMEA principles to ED Safety, identify possible breakdowns, their causes, and effects in the ED, thus improving patient safety and outcomes.
Designed to support both medication safety staff and emergency department personnel, this one-hour webinar will discuss medication errors in the ED that occur during the ordering/prescribing and administration stages of the medication-use process in the ED, the most common medication errors, and the medications most frequently involved in the ED. In addition, the webinar will review high-impact, achievable recommendations to improve safe medication delivery in the ED environment.
In a protected Safe Table environment, MPSC will host a discussion, led by Emergency Department professionals on priority patient safety issues as identified by their teams. These may include the impact of workplace violence, overcrowding, and throughput on patient safety, and also on staff safety and wellbeing.
This one-hour webinar will review patient safety issues and teach strategies to utilize during scenarios that have the potential to overwhelm ED resources and when the ED may need to consider rapidly expanding capacity in order to cope with incident-related patient volume. Participants will learn about the ED management of high patient volume through capacity expansion, help identify and support expansion areas within –and preferably nearby– the ED, and surge criteria for when and how to initiate and deescalate the surge plan.
Handoffs are a common source of errors in the ED through miscommunication due to distractions, unclear plans, or different treatment perspectives. This is exacerbated by ED overcrowding, throughput issues, and boarding. This one-hour webinar will present structured handoff tools allowing for improved communication with clear expectations for both parties, and providing an effective two-way exchange of information.
Team training and practice is an essential part of emergency department workflow. TeamSTEPPS® (Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety) is a teamwork and communication systems model that has the potential to improve patient safety while also addressing aspects of staff satisfaction and morale. This two-hour virtual course will include ED-specific examples and adaptions of the TeamSTEPPS® tools.
Although errors were often multifactorial, most diagnostic errors involve failures of clinical decision-making or judgment, regardless of the underlying disease present. Key process failures most often occur in errors in diagnostic assessment, test ordering, and test interpretation. These errors, as with others, are exacerbated by ED wait times, throughput issues, and boarding. During this one-hour webinar, scalable solutions to enhance diagnostic processes will be discussed, targeting the most commonly misdiagnosed clinical presentations to the ED with the potential to cause serious harm.
MPSC operates a listserv for healthcare professionals with an interest in Emergency Department safety. The listserv offers a network for shared and experiential learning and is used by MPSC to share upcoming events and information specific to safety in this specialty. MPSC members may use the listserv to pose questions to the group in order to garner feedback, solutions, and gain consensus on topics related to quality and safety in the ED. Please contact mpsc@marylandpatientsafety.org to be enrolled.