Quality and Safety
Quality and Safety
The Department of Quality & Safety at Children's Mercy Kansas City provides a systematic, integrated framework to support and continually improve the quality of patient care. We support the hospital's performance-enhancement efforts through planning, quality assessment and monitoring with continuous quality-improvement principles and methodologies.
Improving care for patients and families
The changing needs of patients and families, the current health care environment, and The Joint Commission's Agenda for Change, mandate that all Children's Mercy staff continually improve all aspects of care and services. These improvements include measurable clinical outcomes, increased efficiency, timeliness, effectiveness and safety. Children's Mercy is also on the forefront of national efforts to improve the quality and safety of patient care as a member of the Hospital Improvement and Innovation Network.
Department philosophy
To help the hospital and staff meet the mission and vision of providing the highest quality care to children and families through process planning, evaluation, facilitation and improvement.
Measures and outcomes
At Children's Mercy, we strive to continually improve the care we give patients and families by regularly measuring our performance. Measurement allows us to evaluate our performance, learn from past experience, celebrate our successes and improve upon the care we provide.
How we measure effectiveness
We measure the effectiveness of our performance in many ways, including:
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Outcomes
Outcome measures teach us, on a large scale, how the treatment we provide helps the patients we care for. -
Patient Feedback
This information helps us learn how we can continue to improve our patient-family centered focus. -
Process Measurement
For example, each year we strive to give the annual flu vaccine to all of our employees. We then measure what percent we were able to reach. -
National Standards Comparison
We often evaluate how our care and services compare to national standards and benchmarks by analyzing other leading children's hospitals.
Asthma is a lung disease with recurring episodes which cause wheezing, chest tightness, shortness of breath and coughing.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 248,000 bloodstream infections occur in U.S. hospitals each year.
The Centers for Disease Prevention & Control (CDC) has recommended yearly flu vaccine for health care workers since the 1980’s.
Hand hygiene is a simple and effective way to prevent infections in healthcare settings.
A pressure injury, sometimes called a "bed sore", is an area of skin damage caused by pressure or a medical device that can result in an open wound.
A surgical site infection is an infection that occurs after surgery in the part of the body where the surgery took place.
Department Leadership
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Carol Kemper, PhD, RN, CPHQ, CPPS Kelly Miller, MSN, RN, CPNP, CPHQ Felicity Pino, MS BME, MPA Katie Taff, MBA, MHA, CPXP |
Lisa Schroeder, MD Sarah Fouquet, PhD Kate Gibbs, MHA, CCLS Yui-Yee Raymond Chan, MD, MS, FAAP |