PBME Safety Award 2008

The 2008 PBME Safety Award was presented to Patty Regal and Joan Brown at a joint department meeting on January 7th, 2009. 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.

Jeff Cooper presented the 2008 PBME Patient Safety Award to Patty Anglin-Regal, RN and Joan Brown.

Patty and Joan were nominated by an MGH manager who gave the following justification for the award:

"For the past 18 months, Joan and Patty have chaired the Clinical Alarms committee and led members of nursing through the process of evaluating clinical alarm issues and generating recommendations for implementation. Their work has increased the awareness of clinical alarms settings and defaults for of all of the nursing staff. It raised the issue of standardizing a process for determining distributed speaker systems and illuminated the need for education and for hand-off processes to lessen the chance of a patient being harmed due to a clinical alarm issue.

Following the task force's work, Joan and Patty developed the recommendations and have been presenting this to nursing leadership. Their information is driving home the point of the need for a change in culture to address this issue. They have worked extensively on training as a method for moving us to a safety culture and for recommendations for alarm volumes, criterion for default setting decisions and changes in workflow that would allow for communication of changes in alarm settings between clinicians.

Joan and Patty have been vigilant with this issue since it was first raised. They guided a group of diverse opinions to a consensus about patient safety and standardization. Their work for patient safety is to be commended."