Patient Safety is a core value at Cayuga Medical Center and we are committed to eliminating preventable events of harm to our patients and employees by becoming a High Reliability Organization. High Reliability is defined as maintaining consistently high levels of safety and quality over time across all services and settings. We have adopted the following practices as part of our High Reliability journey.
Teamwork and communication
We recognize that teamwork and communication is essential to providing quality health care. At Cayuga Medical Center all staff (clinical and non-clinical) work collaboratively to prevent errors, improve patient outcomes and increase patient satisfaction. Every morning members of the management team huddle to discuss safety concerns and issues that have occurred during the past 24 hours as well as current issues that need resolving. In addition department specific huddles are conducted every day to address safety and patient concerns.
Just Culture
Cayuga Medical Center is committed to a culture of preventing errors through our Just Culture Program. Just Culture refers to a system of shared accountability where our leaders are accountable for the systems and processes they have designed. Employees, in turn, are accountable for the quality of their choices when carrying out their work and for reporting errors and near misses through our incident reporting system. Individuals who are involved in an error or near miss participate in a non-punitive Root Cause analysis to help us understand what happened, why it happened and correct our processes to prevent future errors from occurring.
Embedding Safety Behaviors into All We Do
Cayuga Medical Center is focused on safety behaviors and error prevention by adhering to the following safety practices:
Lean Six Sigma Training
Lean Six Sigma is a structured quality improvement methodology that relies on a collaborative team effort to remove inefficiencies in how we carry out our work, eliminate errors and improve the patient or customer experience. Cayuga Medical Center provides Yellow and Green Belt Lean Six Sigma training to all levels of staff with the goal of engaging and equipping staff with the skills to lead improvement teams, implement changes and sustain results.