Quality is Important at Tenet

Quality Commitment

Tenet hospitals are committed to providing safe, quality healthcare. Over the past several years, we have devoted countless hours and resources to support our hospitals in their continuous efforts to improve quality and safety.

The Partnership for Change

About three years ago Tenet hospitals began implementing a unique quality initiative called The Partnership for Change. The program uses research based on clinical data and scientific evidence to help physicians providing services in our hospitals identify best clinical practices and implement safer, more effective treatments for their patients. Each of our hospitals reviews the Partnership for Change with its Medical Staff and independently adopts and implements the program.

Evidence-based practices are the key to the Partnership for Change’s clinical improvement strategies. For example, scientific evidence indicates that heart attack patients who receive aspirin and/or beta blockers immediately upon arrival at the hospital have lower in-hospital mortality rates than those who do not. Through Partnership for Change, many of our hospitals have adopted a concurrent monitoring system to help ensure that these patients receive the appropriate medication. And since scientific evidence also shows that taking these medications produces a lower rate of recurrent heart attacks, these hospitals also have a monitoring system to help ensure that their patients receive prescriptions for maintenance of aspirin and/or beta blockers upon discharge from the hospital.

In addition, within the next 12 months all Tenet hospitals will adopt the American Heart Association's "Get With The Guidelines" protocol for recurrent heart attacks. We are one of the largest single systems to adopt the AHA guidelines. Fifty-nine Tenet hospitals received the AHA “Get with the Guidelines” first level award in February 2003. And we expect even more Tenet hospitals to achieve these levels in 2003 and 2004.

Hospitals implementing the Partnership for Change program also take a rigorous approach to help their caregivers prevent medication errors. For example, these hospital pharmacies monitor antibiotic use to help ensure that medications are adjusted based on individual patients and compliance with drug-specific dosing guidelines. Consistent with FDA requirements, Broadlane, Tenet’s group purchasing organization, is also working with pharmaceutical manufacturers to change the labels on “look-alike” medications that may be easily confused with other drugs.

Patient Safety

Partnership for Change is not the only patient safety initiative at Tenet. Because patient safety is truly a multi-disciplinary responsibility, we’ve put together a Patient Safety Committee whose sole task is to utilize internal and external patient safety information to develop patient safety tools that our hospitals may then implement. For example, the Patient Safety Committee has developed a surgical site policy that our hospitals have used as a base-line in developing their policies to reduce wrong-site surgeries.

Additional Methods

Based on research done last year, scientists commissioned by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality recently recommended that hospitals consider 11 quality and safety methods that are supported by solid clinical and scientific evidence. Tenet hospitals have already implemented, are in the process of implementing or are actively studying these recommendations. By using these quality and safety methods, our hospitals are concentrating on ways to improve their processes that will lead to better care for their patients. These process changes and improvements range from simple changes like using pressure-relieving bedding materials to prevent bed sores to very complex changes requiring close coordination between physicians, nurses and other hospital departments. For example, streamlining systems so that nurses can administer antibiotics 30 to 60 minutes prior to a patient going into surgery requires great coordination between dozens of hospital departments and personnel, but can result in lower wound infection rates.

As demonstrated here, Tenet hospitals are committed to studying and implementing ways to reduce medical errors and improve safety.