Disclosure of Adverse Events: A Guide for Clinicians.

Introduction: Children's Hospitals' Solutions for Patient Safety (SPS) acknowledged a recommendation from the American Academy of Pediatrics to develop education programs on the communication of adverse events with patients and families. SPS set out to create a guide that would outline a standardized disclosure process and provide a training curriculum and tools so that providers would feel better prepared to have effective disclosure conversations.

Methods: SPS disclosure work began with the development of a project team made up of 9 network hospitals.

Patient safety culture transformation in a children's hospital: an interprofessional approach.

In 2008, a children's hospital based in the Midwest of the USA launched a hospital-wide safety transformation initiative to improve the safety and quality of care resulting in a decrease in the number of critical safety incidents. In order to build on the early successes of the Hospital's safety program and further improve safety metrics, investigators developed a set of multi-pronged, interprofessional interventions designed to improve overall safety outcomes. The interprofessional interventions focused on didactic training, simulation exercises and safety rounding components.

A safety culture transformation: its effects at a children's hospital.

Objective: To improve pediatric patient safety at a tertiary, 200-bed children's hospital by changing the safety culture and implementing processes, practices, and measures to sustain improvements. Although many core quality and safety measures exist for adult acute-care facilities, equivalent measures for pediatrics are lacking.

Methods: Helen DeVos Children's Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, part of the Spectrum Health system, led a 2-year initiative beginning in late 2007 to improve pediatric patient safety.