Alberta Health Services’ Diana Choma, Clinical Safety Leader and Kelly Chrunik, Clinical Informatics Lead, Child Health, wanted to ensure patients were getting the right care, at the right time, in the right place. They took a deep dive into why they were seeing a delayed reaction in patient deterioration events as a trend provincially.

This deep dive led to the inception of their project, which was to analyze the metrics in early warning systems to improve patient outcomes. The project received support from HIROC’s Safety Grants Program.

On the third episode of Share Scale Repeat, Kelly and Diana walk us through the actions they took in the four education cycles, the results from their project, and share advice for healthcare organizations on actioning a new early warning system.

Quotables:

“If staff don’t know what to do when an alert fires, the system just becomes noise instead of a safety net. It’s really important for institutions to have a protocol in place and socialize this, ensuring they are accessible and ingrained in their everyday safety culture.” – K.C

“When it comes to a tool like this, it’s not taking away your ability to critical think and it’s not there to tell you what you can and can’t do. It’s there to be a decision support tool for you. It enhances, doesn’t replace.” – D.C

“Personally, I’m driven by the belief that every interaction is an opportunity to make a positive impact whether that’s on patients, colleagues, or the healthcare system as a whole. I think it matters to problem solve together with different professionals.” – D.C

“In this project, we had very strong support from our project sponsor. Some days when the tasks felt like it was unreachable…and didn’t quite feel like we may reach the finish line, we would check in with our sponsor and have that fire reignited and just that reminder of what we’re doing is to support our front-line staff, support patient safety, and hopefully improve patient outcomes.” – K.C

Mentioned in this Episode:

· Alberta Health Services

· HIROC

Access more interviews with healthcare leaders at HIROC.com/podcast

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