For the second consecutive
year,
Roxborough
Memorial
Hospital has received a prestigious
Patient Safety Achievement Award honoring excellence and
innovation in health care from the Hospital and Health system
Association of Pennsylvania (HAP). This years award recognized
Roxboroughs entry titled Getting to Zero: Implementation of
the Ventilator Bundle in a
Community
Hospital. It was presented on April
15 at HAPs 2008 Patient Safety Symposium held in
Gettysburg
Ventilator-associated
pneumonia (VAP) is widely recognized as a major source of
morbidity and mortality in ventilated patients being treated in
hospital intensive care units. In addition, these serious
infections have been shown to increase length of stay and
hospital cost significantly. To address these issues, the
national Institute for Healthcare Improvement included VAP as
one of its six initiatives when it launched its100,000
Lives Campaign in 2005.
In conjunction with
Roxborough Memorials overall commitment to the campaign, a
multidisciplinary Intensive Care Unit team of doctors and nurses
worked together to study the hospitals 10 documented VAP cases
in 2003, 12 in 2004 and four in 2005. They also established a
baseline assessment of commonly identified nursing measures in
the ICU in order to provide areas for improvement. Our hospital
readily embraced the goals of the100,000 Lives Campaign,
said medical director
Dr. Sally D. Lane
.
However, even prior to that initiative we were beginning the
process of evaluating the data.
Key to the teams efforts
beginning in April 2005 was the implementation of a ventilator
bundle consisting of six basic measures of care along with
other proven evidence-based practices for ventilated patients.
Standing physician orders for all elements of the bundle were
instituted in 2006. In that year, Roxboroughs documented VAP
cases were reduced to two, and no new cases have occurred since
November of that year. Nursing compliance with all aspects of
the ventilator bundle has been documented with marked
improvement.
These results demonstrate
the value of the ventilator bundle strategy as well as the
dramatic effect of a collaborative, multidisciplinary
performance improvement process on patient care, wrote Dr. Lane
in submitting Roxborough Memorials award-winning patient safety
entry. Joining her in the successful effort were pulmonary
medicine specialists Gregory Lenchner, M.D., and Gerald Diefes,
M.D., infection control practitioner Sharon Bradley, R.N., and
all of the nurses assigned to the Intensive Care Unit.
Return to news page |
