MedStar Health Leaders Invited to White House National Conversation on Patient Safety

Chief Quality & Safety Officer Terry Fairbanks, MD speaks to President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

WASHINGTON – Today, World Patient Safety Day as designated by the World Health Organization, President Biden’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) heard from select healthcare experts, including those from MedStar Health, to highlight successful practices and behaviors that lead to improved patient and workforce safety.

Senior Vice President & Chief Quality and Safety Officer Rollin J. “Terry” Fairbanks, MD and the founding director emeritus of the National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare joined Andrea “Annie” Geraci, NP to speak from the perspective of the system’s leadership focus on safety, just culture, and workforce safety and wellbeing.

“With strong federal support we have created an innovative space where safety scientists and clinical experts collaborate,” said Dr. Fairbanks at the White House Healthcare Safety Forum.

“The impact has been profound - it’s changed the way everyone in the organization thinks about safety, from the boardroom to the executive suite, to the frontline of patient care. As a result, we have advanced our safety management structure, based on the science of safety. Strong safety culture, a proactive approach, and a method of responding to events that treats patients and associates right leads to meaningful progress.”

Dr. Fairbanks also supports recommendations from PCAST for federal leadership and the establishment of evidence-based practices for ensuring patient safety and addressing risks using proven safety engineering approaches.

More than a decade ago, Annie Geraci was a young bedside nurse involved in an adverse event when she worked on a diabetes floor. Fortunately, the patient involved recovered but Geraci was initially blamed for what was in actuality confusing guidance by the manufacturer of a piece of medical equipment with an alert display that made critically low sugar levels appear as critically high.

After the Quality and Safety Human Factors team performed a systems-based review, it understood better the equipment’s faulty device design, made improvements to their systems, worked directly with the device company’s design team, and reported it to the federal device reporting system.

“I am grateful to the systems-based event review team for their approach in reviewing the case, listening, supporting, and caring for me as a person,” Geraci told the group gathered for the safety forum. “I’ve seen a lot of change for the better in the last 13 years since this event. I’m proud to work for an organization that I feel truly cares for patients and frontline healthcare workers by innovating, investing time and resources to make systematic changes and break away from the status quo.”

Geraci now works as a clinical nursing leader with MedStar Health Connected Primary Care.

“Today’s Healthcare Safety Forum was a meaningful opportunity to have an honest conversation about the importance of sharing what health systems are doing that’s working to promote patient safety,” said Dr. Fairbanks. “We hope PCAST will take the experiences shared today to make healthcare safer for all, nationwide.”

More than a decade ago, MedStar Health worked with Annie Geraci to produce this video to help managers understand the importance of how associates should be treated after an adverse event. Hundreds of hospitals and health systems across the United States and around the world now use the video for their own safety culture training. That includes the Veterans Administration (VA) which uses it to train all 400,000 of its employees as well as the National Institutes of Health.

“The more than 350K hits on YouTube, separate from the VA which has the video separately, demonstrates how just one nurse’s experience can resonate for everyone involved in healthcare. Annie’s Story is an example of a valuable lesson for all of us and actually made us better at how we look at and proactively address patient safety,” said Dr. Fairbanks.

To learn more about the PCAST Healthcare Safety Forum, please see the White House press release here.