Nursing Practice News and Information for Nurses in Washington State

In the 1950s and 1960s, airplane errors that resulted in fatalities occurred in 1 out of every 200,000 flights. Today, air fatalities occur in less than 1 of every 2 million flights, according to Boeing’s Keith Leverkuhn, Vice President of Engineering and General Manager of Propulsion Systems. Leverkuhn was among a group of presenters at a quality assurance forum held April 11 in Seattle by the American College of Surgeons.
Collaboration and strategy sharing among organizations whose level of quality can determine life or death makes sense. For the Boeing Company, standardization of practices, such as the development of checklists, has been adopted by surgeons. Use of this strategy has led to safer outcomes for patients and airline passengers alike. For surgeons in Washington State, quality improvement is manifested most publicly by the physician-operated development and maintenance of the Surgical Care and Outcomes Assessment Program (SCOAP). SCOAP was started in 2009 as a voluntary collaborative to create “an aviation-like surveillance and response system for surgical quality. SCOAP’s goal is to improve quality by reducing variation in process of care and outcomes at every hospital in the region” (SCOAP, 2012). More than 50 hospitals in the state now participate in the program. Changes and improvements made as a result of SCOAP’s efforts can be viewed online at http://www.scoap.org/overview.
As the most populous workforce in health care, nurses’ contributions and commitment to patient safety have long been documented. WSNA has long held that standardization of practices in and across nurses’ working environments promotes a culture of safety. For more information about nursing safety in Washington State, visit the patient safety section of our website. And mark your calendars for the Culture of Safety workshop April 25 at the Skagit Valley Casino.
Reference
SCOAP (2012). Retrieved from http://www.scoap.org/overview