Quoteworthy
We have to adjust our health care delivery to new models and make it better for patients - improving access, improving health, and to improving patient experience.
Peter Weir

Most Recent
3 Steps from Harm

Patient safety nurse coordinators Raelynn Fredrickson and Deborah Sax share an essential patient safety concept in honor of national patient safety awareness week.

Tough Safety Calls: When to Console, Coach or Sanction

Patient safety nurse coordinators Raelynn Fredrickson and Deborah Sax share another essential patient safety concept in honor of national patient safety awareness week.

Respect the Disease Process—Don’t Fear It

Kim Orton, Pediatric Clinical Nurse Coordinator for Epilepsy within the Division of Neurology, shares some insights on what it's like returning to the workplace and how we can keep each other safe.

Safety Is Central To Our "New Normal"

In this new miniseries director of patient safety Iona Thraen examines our safety and quality improvement efforts through the clarifying lens of our coronavirus response. Part 1 focuses on patient-centered care and patient safety and proves just how much patient safety is embedded in our culture.

SPIKES: A Strategy for Delivering Bad News

No one likes to be the bearer of bad news—but in health care, it’s part of the job. Fortunately, there’s a simple framework to help us get through it. Hospitalist and UACT co-director Claire Ciarkowski introduces SPIKES: a simple mnemonic for delivering bad news.

Creating Safety Through Learning

What does it mean to take a system approach to problems? The discipline to learn as a team, patience to wade through hundreds of cases, and a diversity of perspectives. Utah’s Critical Care Senior Nursing Director Colleen Connelly, System Quality, Patient Safety, and Value Senior Director Sandi Gulbransen, and Associate Chief Medical Quality Officer Kencee Graves reflect on what they’ve learned by studying system problems with an interdisciplinary team.

Vision, Guardrails and Empowerment: Working in a Team of Teams Culture

In this provocative thought piece, hospitalists and system leaders Kencee Graves and Bob Pendleton explain the “team of teams” approach to becoming more nimble, responsive, and adaptable to the demands of our changing world.

The High Reliability Thanksgiving

Every year, Cindy Spangler hosts ‘Friendsgiving’ for over forty friends, family, and work colleagues. Cindy is also a senior value engineer and associate editor for Accelerate. So we asked: what is the process behind a successful Thanksgiving?

Chemotherapy Standardization: A Case Study in What it Takes to Design Safe Systems

Preventing medication errors often means using checklists and leveraging technology. But implementing these seemingly simple tools requires interdisciplinary teamwork, learning, and a commitment to ongoing verification that the process is working. Clinical operations nursing director Joy Lombardi describes how Huntsman Cancer Institute made chemotherapy highly reliable.

Do Discharge Prescriptions Correlate with Patient Needs?

General Surgery resident Josh Bleicher spent a year exploring opioid prescribing patterns in patients discharged after elective surgery. What did he find? We need a more patient-centered approach to opioid prescribing.

Diagnostic Error

A missed diagnosis can delay treatment or result in inappropriate treatment, causing unnecessary pain, suffering, and often financial hardship for our patients. Internist and hospitalist Peter Yarbrough helps explain why diagnostic errors happen with strategies to prevent them.

Systems Approach to Error

Medical errors often occur due to system failure, not human failure. Hospitalist Kencee Graves helps explain why we need to evaluate medical error from a system standpoint.