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Quality Update
Excellence Without Borders: Symposium to Showcase Quality Worldwide
In intensive care units and scattered medical wards throughout The Johns Hopkins Hospital, mini-revolutions are taking place. The change, slowly gaining steam, is in the way frontline medical staff are questioning the way they provide patient care. They’ve become empowered to find system breakdowns that impinge on quality or safety and fix them.
Their successes, great and small, are numerous. In the Weinberg ICU, for example, nurses are double-checking medication orders to make sure patients are discharged on the proper drugs. And in the medical ICU, staff frustrated by taking time away from the bedside to transport patients to laboratory and imaging tests came up with the idea of creating a skilled transport team to take on that job, an idea that has been adopted hospitalwide.
Now, Hopkins wants to export its experiences around the world. The Center for Innovation in Quality Patient Care and Johns Hopkins International have joined forces to hold a three-day symposium Oct. 29–31 on tools and solutions that lead to quality and safe care. It will be held at the Wyndham Baltimore Inner Harbor Hotel and open to health care leaders from the United States and abroad. The symposium will include morning plenary sessions, afternoon tracks on quality, safety and nursing/patient care, as well as tours of the hospital units where these creative changes have occurred.
The idea for the symposium germinated last year, when Johns Hopkins International held a seminar for foreign CEOs and physician and nursing executives from countries as diverse as Jordan, Spain and Japan. Topics ranged from developing quality improvement strategies, to reducing medication errors and hospital-acquired infections to the purchasing of medical equipment. Concerns over whether these issues would hold the attention of foreign health care officials was unfounded, notes Clara Marin, International’s senior manager for external communications, as the seminar held in November, and a subsequent session in May, were sold out.
For more information about this or other educational events, please visit Special Events and Seminars to view a .pdf file of the program. |
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Symposium for Hospital Administrators:
Practical Approaches to Quality in Patient Care -- PDF Format |
