PRINCETON – The New Jersey Hospital Association, along with the National Patient Safety Foundation, is celebrating national Patient Safety Awareness Week March 3-9.

This year’s theme, Patient Safety 7/365, focuses on medication safety and healthcare culture and safety and reminds healthcare professionals and health consumers that providing safe patient care requires constant dedication and effort, 365 days a year.

The NJHA Institute for Quality and Patient Safety is a federally designated “Patient Safety Organization,” and in observance of Patient Safety Awareness Week, NJHA shares five great reasons to celebrate quality healthcare in New Jersey.

1. All of New Jersey’s acute care hospitals are participating in a two-year national initiative through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services called Partnership for Patients. NJHA is proud to be appointed by CMS to lead this effort in the Garden State through a “hospital engagement network.” Hospitals engaged in this initiative are working together, with NJHA and with national experts to improve the quality, safety and affordability of healthcare by targeting and reducing preventable injuries and complications.
2. One priority in the Partnership for Patients is to promote healthy newborns by reducing pre-term births and other complications. In New Jersey, 51 hospitals have put that priority into policy by discontinuing the scheduling of early elective deliveries prior to week 39 of a pregnancy. They also have developed training programs around adverse events like maternal hemorrhage and medication safety.
3. New Jersey’s hospitals have demonstrated success in reducing pneumonia in patients, an issue in which hospitalized patients using ventilators are especially vulnerable. But among New Jersey hospitals participating in NJHA’s network, 20 hospitals have gone six months or longer without experiencing an incidence of ventilator-associated pneumonia.
4. Hospitals in the Garden State have continuously improved their performance as evidenced in the state Department of Health’s Hospital Performance Report. In the most recent report, New Jersey hospitals exceeded national scores on 15 of 25 national measures and were equal to the national norms on eight measures.
5. Those results stack up in the top tier of healthcare quality nationwide. New Jersey ranked ninth in the United States overall across all healthcare quality and safety measures in the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Best Performing States report.                                                                                        

NJHA’s Partnership for Patients provides a number of resources for both healthcare providers and consumers to join the effort to improve healthcare quality. A number of consumer brochures are available for download in English and Spanish. The main site can be found at www.njha.com/PfP and the consumer brochures are available at www.njha.com/PfP/Consumers. For more on Patient Safety Awareness Week in New Jersey, visit www.njha.com/quality-patient-safety/partnership-for-patients/patient-safety-week/.