Patient Safety

Patient safety is a major initiative in health care. The AAN's Patient Safety Subcommittee reflects the Academy's commitment in this area, with cross-functional representation needed to identify and address patient safety issues. The subcommittee is committed to safe high quality neurological care.

Increasing member awareness of patient safety issues and providing neurologists with tools and programs to enhance patient safety can:

• Improve patient care
• Facilitate the creation of more efficient office practices
• Improve practice risk management strategies

2008 Patient Safety Colloquium

"Essential Patient Safety for the Neurologist – Does Your Practice Measure Up?"
Sunday, April 13, 2008
9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Do you have a detector to monitor patient safety in your practice? Does it work? To find out, attend this year's colloquium, which examines the expanding role of measurement in neurology patient safety. Measurement is essential not only to monitor our efforts and document outcome improvement, but also to redirect future strategies aimed at improved patient safety and care in neurology. Information provided through this program can be linked to many of the core competencies and may be used to demonstrate participation in patient safety programming needed for licensure. Free to all meeting registrants. The program fulfills several core competencies needed for certification/maintenance of certification.

2007 Patient Safety Colloquium

"Patient Safety Is No Accident: Practical Strategies for a Safer Neurology Practice"

Materials now available on the web. View the 2007 Patient Safety Colloquium Education Program, which includes syllabi and PowerPoint slides from presentations included in the colloquium.

Read, Use, and Share Patient Safety Tips

For patient safety tips relating to medication error prevention and reduction, for example, go to the Patient Safety Tips section and select Tip Search. Type in the search term medication errors and view the tips that appear in the Results box. If you have patient safety tips that you would like to share, click on Suggest a Tip. Submitting a safety tip is easy and will take only a few minutes of your time.

We welcome your feedback on the safety tip submission process or on any other patient safety-related subject. If you have a tip but don?t see an appropriate category, please let us know. We appreciate your input. Contact us at patientsafety@aan.com

Patient Safety Subcommittee

The Patient Safety Subcommittee, which reports to the Practice Committee, was initially established as a work group in 2004 by the AAN in response to the Institute of Medicine Report, which called on medical specialty societies to make a visible commitment to patient safety by establishing a permanent committee dedicated to safety improvement.

The Patient Safety Subcommittee's goals are to:

• Promote a culture of safety in neurology, including safe harbor legislation
• Enhance the patient outcome by identifying and addressing safety issues
• Develop systems for recognizing harm and tracking improvements
• Incorporate safety components into guidelines

Patient Safety Subcommittee Initiatives

• Patient safety tips, tools, and resources
• Health literacy
• Patient safety colloquium
• Communications (neurologist-patient, handoffs, etc.)
• Patient safety education
• Neurologic condition-specific patient safety issues (i.e., epilepsy, stroke, sleep)
• Abuse and violence in neurological care
• Culture change for patient safety
• Error reporting

Neurologic Patient Safety Needs You

• Volunteer to work on patient safety projects overseen by the Patient Safety Subcommittee. To volunteer email Natalie Madgy
• Submit patient safety tips often, using the new online submission process
• Consider a patient safety presentation at your next state society meeting