CHC Joins 5 Million Lives Campaign

Mar 09,2007 00:00 by Bend_Weekly_News_Sources

Cascade Healthcare Community (CHC) joins IHI’s 5 Million Lives Campaign to reduce medical harm throughout the nation; An estimated 15 million incidents occur each year

Cascade Healthcare Community (CHC) announced that it has joined the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s 5 Million Lives Campaign, a national campaign to dramatically reduce incidents of medical harm in U.S. hospitals. CHC participated in the statewide kickoff for the national campaign via teleconference last Friday.

The 5 Million Lives Campaign asks hospitals to improve the care they provide in order to protect patients from five million incidents of medical harm over a 24-month period, ending December 9, 2008. It represents a continuation of the largest improvement effort undertaken in recent history by the healthcare industry.

The Campaign was formally unveiled on December 12, 2006 and has been endorsed by the American Hospital Association (AHA), the American Nurses Association (ANA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO).

The 5 Million Lives Campaign builds upon the success of the 100,000 Lives Campaign, in which 3,100 participating hospitals reduced inpatient deaths by an estimated 122,000 in 18 months through overall improvement in care, including improvement associated with six interventions recommended by the initiative.

“Our goal is to continually improve the quality of care, and to meet or beat the benchmark in every quality initiative,” said Pam Steinke, Vice President of Quality Management for CHC. “Our participation in the 5 Million Lives campaign goes hand in hand with our own ongoing internal efforts to improve the quality of our care.”

IHI estimates that 15 million incidents of medical harm occur in U.S. hospitals each year. This estimate of overall national harm is based on IHI’s extensive experience in studying injury rates in hospitals, which reveals that between 40 to 50 incidents of harm occur for every 100 hospital admissions. With 37 million admissions in the United States each year (according to the AHA’s National Hospital Survey for 2005) this equates to approximately 15 million harm events annually - or 40,000 incidents of harm in U.S. hospitals every day.

IHI defines “medical harm” as unintended physical injury resulting from or contributed to by medical care (including the absence of indicated medical treatment) that requires additional monitoring, treatment or hospitalization, or results in death.

CHC plans to implement and continue working on the following interventions as part of their participation in the 5 Million Lives Campaign:

*   Reduce surgical complications...by reliably implementing the changes in care recommended by the Surgical Care Improvement Project (SCIP)

*   Deliver reliable, evidence-based care for congestive heart failure…to reduce readmissions

*   Deliver reliable, evidence-based care for acute myocardial infarction…to prevent deaths from heart attack.

*   Prevent surgical site infections…by following a series of steps, including reliable, timely administration of correct perioperative antibiotics.

There is no cost for hospitals to join the 5 Million Lives Campaign, though there is an obligation to adopt at least one intervention and an expectation of regularly reporting hospital profile and mortality data throughout the Campaign.