CEO Message

Quality and Safety Through Transparency and Compassion

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As the quality and safety arm for CHA and the Regional Associations, the Hospital Quality Institute (HQI) is always working to find new ways to help hospitals not only improve the lives of the patients they touch, but also create a culture of patient safety within their organizations.  

This month, HQI launched its newest initiative, HQI Cares, a customizable, fee-for-service program that quite literally has the potential to transform each hospital’s approach to patient safety. It’s comprehensive and compassionate, and it recognizes that, when adverse events occur, openness with patients and families about those events creates greater connections and opportunities for better care — and that, during those moments, caregivers need care, too.  

The result of a partnership with BETA Healthcare Group and its BETA HEART® (healing, empathy, accountability, resolution, and trust) program, HQI Cares is grounded in one of the foundational principles of patient safety — the importance of transparency and honesty. The program helps health care workers commit to this vital work, but it also values those workers by teaching them how to have tough conversations, mentoring and supporting them along the way.  

It lifts them up in the very difficult work they take on every day. 

Hospitals engaged in HQI Cares first get a gap analysis, then workshops, and finally customized plans to help them identify the tools and training needed to begin to shift their quality and patient safety culture, with five main focus areas: 

  • Developing accountable and reliable systems that support provision of safe care 
  • Supporting and valuing all members of the health care delivery team 
  • Developing empathic and clinically appropriate processes that support both patients and clinicians after an adverse event 
  • Developing mechanisms for early, ethical resolution of harm caused by medical error or inappropriate care 
  • Instilling trust between clinicians and patients 

As hospital leaders, your work during this extraordinary point in history has taken on new dimensions in doing what’s good for your organizations and for your workforce, but with a bottom line that has never wavered: making sure those who come to you for help are getting the safest, highest quality care possible.  

HQI and the hospital associations will continue to support you with programs like HQI Cares, offering needed bench strength to advance your mission of care.  

CARMELA