April 23, 2007
In the 1990s, both the National Safety Council and the Wisconsin Council of Safety dropped their healthcare-specific sections. John Bruce had been thinking of convening an independent safety colloquium, and in March 2002 he started meeting with around a half dozen other healthcare safety professionals from southeastern Wisconsin.
Five years later that group, the Wisconsin HealthCare Safety Council, brings together more than 90 members from across the state to discuss best practices outside the constraints of business competition.
“It was kind of groundbreaking (in 2002) because with all the competing healthcare organizations coming together it was kind of unusual,” said current council president Robert Peck. “We are all these different healthcare systems and providers putting aside all the concerns about market share to really make things safer.”
“There are no barriers,” Bruce said. “The most we’ll say is ‘well, at our facility we do this, but how do you do it in yours?’ Five years ago you were almost afraid to say ‘hi’ to someone from another system.”
Bruce said any political or economic jockeying between healthcare systems happens at higher level of management — council members meet in a collegial atmosphere to learn how to make hospitals safer.
When the council convened in 2002, the concern of facilities managers in any area of industry following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks was to review safety procedures and evacuation plans. The council evaluated the evacuation equipment and procedures and made recommendations about which plans to promote.
Now the council is working on creating general evacuation guides for nursing homes, which could be easily adapted to specific facilities.
In addition of emergency preparedness training, the council looks at everything from building code updates to pandemic disease plans. While not specifically focused on improving employee safety or patient care, examining facility safety procedures improves those areas.
“We really look at what we term the ‘environment of care,’ and that really covers everything from the emergency systems to the back-up phone systems,” Peck said. “We kind of look at the total environment and how it impacts patient care and also employee safety.”
Members present specialized topics to each other at meetings — from the specifics of hospital heating and ventilation systems to insurance agencies’ loss prevention programs.
Hospitals are required to stage simulated disaster drills, and the council has been able to coordinate some of those exercises into countywide mock emergencies, with hospitals from different systems working together under a central command post. Through those run-throughs yield new ideas, Bruce said, such as using surrounding clinics for minor injuries following a disaster and reserving emergency room space for more seriously wounded.
Hospital emergency codes are another area of interest for the council. Facilities usually color-coordinate emergencies so as not to create a panic among patients, but the codes are often different in each location. What the heck is a Code Black, anyway?
“In some healthcare systems they might not even have the same codes at hospitals that are in the same system,” Peck said. “So the emphasis is on more plain language than these codes.”
Peck said severe weather warnings are a good example. In some systems, a Code Gray might stand for a tornado watch, and Code Black for a tornado warning.
“But people are used to hearing ‘severe thunderstorm’ or ‘tornado watch’ or ‘warning,’” Peck said.
The council determined plain language would work fine in those cases, he said. But their recommendations would show other cases, such as simple “Code Red” for a fire, when the code was appropriate.
“In one hospital code blue meant a cardiac arrest and in antoher it meant evacuation,” Bruce said. “We always joked that instead of responding to the cardiac arrest everybody would run outside because it meant total evacuation.”
Bruce said the council’s recommendations weren’t implemented because many of the healthcare systems said they were receptive to the idea of uniform codes, as long as they were the codes they already used.
“We’ve just been kind of plugging along, trying to spot needs,” Bruce said.
The council’s monthly meetings are held around the state so its members, which now include safety officers from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Hinsdale, Ill., share the burden of commuting. The council began charging annual dues of $20 to offset the cost of minor expenses such as printing safety documents.
Peck said the group is planning a Web site that will allow members to access safety documents electronically.