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2009 PBME Patient Safety Award
Recognizing Dedication to Excellence in Patient Safety

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The 2009 PBME Safety Award was presented to Bob Ribeiro and Caitlin Fairneny at a joint department meeting on January 6, 2010. The award is given to individual department members or teams that best exemplify the patient safety culture that we strive to create. This can be identifying and/or correcting a hazard, making a special effort to reduce risk, or identifying personal weaknesses or errors and teaching others to develop ways to prevent them. This award is supported by the Shirley Cooper Memorial Fund.



Bob received two nominations for this award. Below are excerpts from the nominations.

"We had post-implementation staff/patient safety issues with the new IV pump racks in the Cardiac loop. Bob Ribeiro stepped up, worked collaboratively with multiple departments, and took the lead in fabricating a modified bed bracket to increase rack stability and make our staff and patients safer. This modification was accepted by the vendor and is now being applied to all of our ICU beds.

This was a highly sophisticated modification that required a tremendous amount of time and effort to design, fabricate, and implement. Bob stayed late, worked weekends, and devoted his full time and attention to this matter, making patient and staff safety his top priority. "Bob's devotion to this project goes well beyond the core responsibilities of his job and I can confidently say that we never would have found a solution to this problem without Bob. The entire Cardiac loop, including nursing and Anesthesia are very grateful for his hard work. Best of all, we can all now be confident that our patients and staff in the Cardiac loop are safe while in our care."

"Once the problem was presented to him, Bob immediately recognized its critical nature and relentlessly worked towards a solution. In many conversations with him about the racks, it was obvious to me that he did not view this as "just" an engineering problem - it was a patient safety problem that happened to require an engineering solution. His vigilance and awareness of safety is even more remarkable considering that much of his work lies outside of the clinical environment."

Congratulations, Bob!

Julian Goldman presented Caitlin Fairneny with the 2009 Patient Safety Award.