WEEKLY UPDATE: 04/17/25
This week, in an article analyzing falls prevention efforts in healthcare institutions, Hearst Connecticut Media highlighted hospitals’ and health systems’ continuous journey to improve patient safety and eliminate preventable harm through the Connecticut Hospital Association’s (CHA) statewide high reliability initiative.
In 2012, Connecticut was the first state in the nation to create a high reliability initiative to eliminate all cause preventable harm, seeking to consolidate and standardize safety measures. During the first phase of the initiative, hospitals developed a high reliability maturity assessment to identify areas of improvement and build a roadmap to accomplish statewide collaboration goals.
“It’s a statewide initiative to use high reliability science to prevent harm, and so we’ve been at it for a long time,” Jennifer Jackson, CEO of CHA, told Hearst.
“We practiced root-cause analysis, to go back to the safety event and look at the process,” Caryl Ryan, vice president for quality and patient care services at UConn Health, explained to the news outlet.
In 2023, CHA launched the second phase of the initiative, HRO Forward, which, steered by the roadmap, focuses on fostering a culture of safety, advancing mitigation measures, and sharing best practices. Healthcare professionals across disciplines are engaging in extensive training to learn about the latest innovations in safety science and implementing collaborative strategies to continue elevating the quality and safety of care in Connecticut healthcare settings.
“Hospitals work together, and they share what they learn from errors… They share their implementation of the behaviors and how they’re keeping people safe,” Jackson said.
As the state’s population grows older, Department of Public Health (DPH) data show unintentional falls are the leading cause of death for individuals 75 years or older and nearly half of all emergency room visits for a head injury are fall-related. In 2023, 411 older adults in Connecticut died from falls in all settings, and 36,534 were sent to the hospital for care.
“We all recognize that at some point, patients may fall in an institution,” Ryan said. “The goal is having zero falls with injury. That’s really what we want to see.”
Ryan discussed how UConn John Dempsey Hospital is leveraging technology to support fall prevention and achieve patient safety goals. A new, mobile video-monitoring device called a “Telesitter” allows care teams to observe multiple patients in real-time and respond immediately if a patient attempts to get out of bed, putting themselves in danger.
Connecticut hospitals and health systems are also participating in Falls Free CT. Launched in partnership between the Connecticut Department of Aging and Disability Services (ADS) and the Connecticut Department of Public Health (DPH), Falls Free CT is a coalition uniting falls prevention champions to reduce the incidence of falls among older adults, educate professionals and the public about the importance of falls prevention, and share resources and best practices.
Click here to learn more about hospitals’ quality and patient safety initiatives.
