Welcome

Welcome to the web site of the Washington Patient Safety Coalition. Our mission is to reduce medical errors and improve safety for people receiving health care in Washington. Our goal is to become the premier resource for patient safety activities in Washington. Please view our mission, goals, and principles.

The WPSC is a voluntary organization of diverse stakeholders committed to improving safety and reducing errors. Our collaborative, non-punitive approach builds on Washington’s significant history of innovative quality improvement efforts, which have brought together broad groups of participants in a collaborative atmosphere to achieve shared goals. This history has fostered a supportive environment for effective new working relationships among the many communities interested in and committed to patient safety. The Coalition welcomes the involvement of individuals and organizations from all parts of the health care system: consumers, providers, purchasers, regulators, quality improvement and risk reduction organizations, researchers, and others.

The WSPC is recognized by the State of Washington’s Department of Health as a Coordinated Quality Improvement Program (CQIP). This provides important legal protection for the quality improvement activities carried out under the auspices of the Coalition.

The Coalition’s Steering Committee provides leadership and strategic planning for the Coalition; its members represent the major interests and stakeholders in health care and patient safety.

The Washington Patient Safety Coalition is hosted and facilitated by the Foundation for Health Care Quality, a private, not for profit organization in Seattle. The Foundation was asked by the Coalition organizers to serve in this role because it is recognized and respected as a ‘safe table’ to which representatives of many parts of the health care system can come together to work on shared goals.

Please contact us for information about the Coalition and how to become involved with and support our work.

This web site was developed with and is maintained by the generous support of the Washington State Medical Association.

What’s New

online event registration
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Patient Safety Network

The Coalition sponsors the Patient Safety Network, a group of professionals committed to improving the safety of patients in our healthcare system, whose next meeting is coming up soon:

May 2, 2008 at Group Health Cooperative, Seattle. Discussion topics are Handoffs and Health Literacy.

"The Network keeps me informed on issues that affect all of us in different ways… Discussions are always useful."

The procedure safety teleconferences have expanded to a variety of patient safety topics; click here for a complete list of dates and topics.

Visit the Sites and Resources page for information on adverse events reporting systems in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and New Jersey, and for presentations from AHRQ’s 2007 Annual Conference.

Anticoagulation resource:

The Institute for Safe Medicine Practice (ISMP) highly recommends conducting an interdisciplinary failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) within your facility to identify organization-specific sources of failure with the use of anticoagulants, and to individualize the key improvements needed to reduce the risk of harmful errors with these medications. To assist you, ISMP has created a sample FMEA, which can be found here.

In the sample FMEA, the severity score for each failure mode has been included. Since the probability of each failure and its ability to be detected before causing patient harm will vary from organization to organization, the probability and detectability scores have been omitted so that each facility can make its own assessment of these vulnerabilities.