Maryland Patient Safety Center

Patient Safety Training

Patient safety is defined as “the absence of preventable harm to a patient and reduction of risk of unnecessary harm associated with health care to an acceptable minimum.” According to the World Health Organization, approximately one in every ten patients is harmed in health care and more than 3 million deaths occur annually due to unsafe care.  The Maryland Patient Safety Center convenes key stakeholders, provides education, and facilitates opportunities for networking and collaboration with the purpose of building workforce capacity to improve healthcare quality and patient safety.

Everyone plays a role in creating environments, processes and systems that support safe patient care.  MPSC will help to ensure that the tools for patient safety and quality are made available to a wide audience, including patient safety officers, healthcare leaders, as well as front-line nurses, physicians, staff, and other members of the care team.  Register for the courses and events below to learn implementable, effective, and practical applications for healthcare workers to improve patient safety systems and processes. 

Patient Safety Forums

Patient Safety Forums provide an opportunity to come together on key topics in patient safety, to learn, share and exchange best practices and  implementation challenges.  Forums include a one-hour presentation, followed by 30-minutes of facilitated discussion, and a post-event Maryland Patient Safety Center Learning in Action document.

Patient Safety Forums are open and FREE to MPSC members only and are held virtually 1:00 – 2:30pm EST.

 

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Additional events, webinars, forums, and protected roundtable discussions available in three high-priority areas of focus:

This webinar and group discussion highlights, Maryland Patient Safety Center Minogue Circle of Honor Award winner, Lifebridge Health Northwest Hospital & Sinai Hospital,  for creating their HIQCUPSS: High Impact Quality Crossing Upholding Practice Solutions and Sustainability rounds. Specifically, the webinar will share how Lifebridge Health sought to improve sustainability of interventions and processes to decrease hospital acquired pressure injuries (HAPIs) by developing a proactive approach to ensure RCA action items were completed in a timely manner and interventions were sustained over time.

This three-day in-person Six Sigma Green Belt course is designed for healthcare professionals who are interested in process improvement.  Participants will develop a sound technical foundation in Six Sigma tools, and will learn and apply the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control) improvement method. Each participant will develop a project that demonstrates understanding of the Six Sigma tools. Participants will complete the coursework, project, and exam necessary for Green Belt certification.

MPSC Members: $750    I    Non-Members: $1,500

This year several Maryland laws were passed which directly impact hospitals and health care organizations. Join MPSC for a one hour webinar presented by Jane Krienke, Director, Government Affairs & Policy and Brandon Floyd, Senior Analyst, Government Affairs & Policy, at the Maryland Hospital Association. During this presentation, attendees will receive an overview of legislation passed during the 2024 Maryland General Assembly that impacts maternal and child health care, emergency department operations, behavioral health care, urgent care centers, and the clinical workforce.

MPSC Members: FREE    I    Non-Members: FREE

This webinar highlights Maryland Patient Safety Center Minogue Circle of Honor Award winner, University of Maryland Baltimore Washington Medical Center  for their work implementing parenteral diuretics for heart failure patients in an ambulatory care setting. Parenteral diuretics help relieve symptoms of congestion more effectively than oral diuretics during exacerbation. Increasing ambulatory access to these medications can help relieve symptoms of edema and vascular congestion without the need for extended hospitalizations.

This full-day in person course dives deep into an important foundational patient safety tool: Failure Modes and Effects Analysis.  FMEA is used for formal and systematic analysis of potential failure modes within a system and applies classifiers by severity and likelihood of failure. The goal of FMEA is to anticipate the most important design problems early in the development of process to either prevent problems or minimize their consequences. Participants will learn how to apply the tool to enhance the quality and safety of healthcare processes and operations.

MPSC Members: FREE    I    Non-Members: $299

Patient falls are one of the most common, costly, and harmful health events across a variety of care settings. This webinar and group discussion will apply nursing process to evaluate patient response to individualized fall prevention care planning, and integrate best practices as  common standards of practice to protect patients from fall-related injuries. In addition, the webinar will consider redesign of patient outcomes from fall and injury rates to mitigation and elimination of fall and injury risk factors for preventable falls and fall -related injuries.

Specimen identification and labeling errors can  put patients at risk of transfusion-related death, medication errors, misdiagnosis, and patient mismanagement. This webinar and group discussion is focused on mistakes related to specimen identification and labeling.   

Healthcare organizations are constantly evolving because of changes in reimbursement, new technology, regulatory requirements, and staffing levels. These modifications cause policies and procedures to change often, and in most cases, quickly. As a result, it is difficult to maintain consistency in processes and systems, which leads to variation. Often this variation results in increased failure risk.  During this full-day, in-person workshop, you will learn root cause analysis techniques to investigate those variances that cause near misses or sentinel events in order to minimize the possibility of future failures and thereby, improve care, treatment, and services provided by your organizations.

MPSC operates a listserv for healthcare professionals with an interest in patient 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 care delivery, adverse events, and general patient safety policies and procedures. Please contact mpsc@marylandpatientsafety.org to be enrolled.