1024 - Lighting the Way: A Seat at the Table for Perioperative Safety, Quality and Compliance

Overview/Abstract: Participants will learn about one hospital’s unique journey to create a role in safety, quality, and compliance specifically dedicated to perioperative services. Partnership with division leaders in nursing, surgery, anesthesia, risk, and hospital administration is driven by the Senior Clinical Director of Perioperative Safety, Quality and Compliance at an executive level to promote excellence in interdisciplinary collaboration. The Senior Director provides guidance, triages sentinel events, evaluates and researches policy and practice and provides follow up to clinical staff in a comprehensive way to align with current regulatory compliance and evidence-based practice in a proactive, rather than reactive manner. This role provides a key interface for representation of perioperative care within the larger quality, safety and compliance community at the hospital level.
Perioperative care has become increasingly complex with innumerable competing priorities. Shifting regulatory expectations, increasing demands in training and retaining qualified staff, ever changing and highly diverse care technology, and shrinking financial budgets contribute to surgical complexity in ways that challenge hospital administrators and perioperative caregivers and heighten the need for a cohesive approach to provide safe high-quality care for patients. Safety cultures that have sustained quality care in past years have become fragmented and struggled to keep pace with the rapidly changing perioperative landscape.

The Institute for Health Care Improvement promotes a unified approach to build responsive, resilient health care systems with the belief that organizations should practice whole system quality within and beyond for sustainability and reliability in meeting the evolving needs of patients and caregivers.