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This article was written by Carole Hemmelgarn, MS, MS and Stacey Gonzalez.
MedStar Health’s commitment to a vision of zero preventable patient harm includes educating tomorrow’s leaders in patient safety.
Healthcare is complex and constantly evolving with the highest stakes. From diagnostic errors to falls to healthcare-associated infections, research found almost one in four patients admitted to a U.S. hospital experienced an adverse event, and about a quarter of those were preventable.
MedStar Health’s Academy of Emerging Leaders in Patient Safety (AELPS) has been working for 20 years to create an industry-wide culture focused on strategies and tactics to reduce patient harm. For the past 12 years, AELPS has been an important part of MedStar Health’s commitment to our vision of zero preventable patient harm under the auspices of the MedStar Health Institute for Quality and Safety.
AELPS’ immersive workshops bring together medical, nursing, and pharmacy students and residents with patient advocates and experts in the field of patient safety. They participate in a hands-on curriculum that changes the way these young professionals think about patient safety and prepares them to be leaders throughout their career.
The program is having an impact. To date, AELPS has educated 1,567 alumni. More than 12% of these are MedStar Health clinicians:
- 79 MedStar Health residents and fellows
- 58 MedStar Health nurses
- 61 Georgetown University medical students
These young professionals are making MedStar Health, and many other medical systems across the nation, safer for patients thanks to AELPS, a unique educational experience that places patient safety at the center of healthcare.
20 years of focus on patient safety.
Founded in 2005 as the Telluride Patient Safety Educational Summer Workshop, patient safety experts and patient advocates came together to create a comprehensive patient safety curriculum. AELPS incorporated this curriculum into a transformative, four-day workshop experience focusing on patient safety concepts and applying quality and safety improvement strategies and tools. Dr. David Mayer founded this program at the University of Illinois, and it has been managed and supported by MedStar Health since 2012 when he brought it with him as MedStar Health’s inaugural system-wide quality and safety leader. Since his retirement, Dr. Mayer has partnered with MedStar Health’s Quality and Safey leadership in an advisory role and remains the MC of this program.
Since the program’s inception, sessions have been held in Colorado, California, Arizona, Washington, D.C., Maryland, Doha, Qatar, and Sydney, Australia.
Applicants are chosen based upon their demonstrated interest in and passion for patient safety, as well as their history of leadership and commitment to ongoing education. They come together with nationally and internationally recognized patient safety leaders and experts to get real-world knowledge and skills, but AELPS is much more than a professional conference.
Instead, learners participate in hands-on experiences that break down the lecture hall framework into short talks, gamified activities, interactive experiences, social opportunities, and open communication.
A spotlight on mindfulness, vulnerability, reflective practice, and psychological safety allows participants and experts to have focused, in-depth conversations about how to create cultural change that keeps more patients safe in real-world healthcare scenarios. These can be lessons that involve tears, deep reflection, and commitment to making a difference.
While participants can expect to draw with crayons, take a hike, and interact with dominos and Potatohead toys, AELPS is serious business. These experiential lessons are centered around a curriculum that helps prepare learners to be safety leaders for a new generation.
Hands-on learning, inside and outside the classroom.
The AELPS curriculum is focused on four core competencies:
- Leadership
- Communication and Relationship
- Professionalism
- Knowledge of Health Environment and Systems
Patients and families are at the center of everything we do, with a focus on compassionate care and health equity. In fact, AELPS involves real patients and family members within its curriculum to offer testimony about their healthcare experiences and have a meaningful role in the discussions among learners.
AELPS participants learn about concepts that support this patient safety framework including:
- High Reliability Organization
- Transparency
- (Just) Culture
- Diagnostic Excellence
- Teamwork
- Reflection
- Communication
- Quality Improvement
- Human Factors
AELPS participants find the lessons that stay with them aren’t always those that happen in the classroom. That’s why the program includes opportunities for freeform discussion, socialization, and team building. These activities foster interaction between learners, faculty, and patient advocates in a relaxed setting, when conversations can lead to real change.
Related reading: Research Shows Machine Learning Can Help Identify Patient Safety Reporting Patterns to Prevent Harmful Events.
Patient safety leadership takes many forms.
There’s more than one way AELPS alumni become leaders in patient safety, because it takes multifaceted commitment to create change.
When it comes to day-to-day operations, AELPS participants learn how to professionally speak up when a colleague makes an error in protocol that could put a patient at risk. They learn practical strategies for communicating errors as they occur, but prioritizing patient safety is about more than being a watchdog.
AELPS participants learn how to help their organizations become safety-driven, from administration through support services, because they know that creating an integrated culture of reporting and sharing (not blaming and shaming) is how change happens. Alumni become the institutional leaders who foster culture of learning and continuous improvement, not punishment.
What’s more, AELPS alumni use the tools they acquire to teach a new generation of colleagues. They return from the program with a full toolkit of the latest research, gaming simulations, videos, and other materials to share with committees and working groups of colleagues.
The impact of this focus on patient safety is making a difference at MedStar Health and beyond.
Related reading: Walking the Walk: How MedStar Health Research Leads to Action on Patient Safety.
Making an impact for patients and families.
MedStar Health’s longstanding commitment to and support of AELPS is one way to demonstrate the organization’s laser focus on patient safety. This investment in personnel who become patient safety leaders advances our vision for zero preventable patient harm in hospitals and health centers across the nation.
With patient safety as a system-wide focus, MedStar Health has developed a reputation for putting patients first.
Some of our AELPS alumni continue their patient safety education through Georgetown’s Clinical Quality, Safety & Leadership Executive Master’s degree program. Our alumni are now taking their place alongside faculty in Becker’s Hospital Review’s 90 Patient Safety Experts to Know, a demonstration of their commitment to patients and AELPS’ impact.
Anecdotally, many alumni now work as Chief Nursing Officers around the US. We hear frequently that they are carrying forward the lessons they learned at AELPS, helping make their institutions safer for patients every day.
Healthcare is risky business, and clinicians make life-impacting decisions with patients every day. To support this critical work and help reduce harms at every level of the process, AELPS workshops provide a strong foundation for tomorrow’s leaders in the important work of patient safety.
A special thanks to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), The Doctors Company Foundation, and the Josie King Foundation for their support of MedStar Health’s AELPS program.
