Chartbook on Patient Safety

1. Making care safer by reducing harm caused in the delivery of care.
2. Ensuring that each person and family is engaged as partners in their care.
3. Promoting effective communication and coordination of care.
4. Promoting the most effective prevention and treatment practices for the leading causes of mortality, starting with cardiovascular disease.
5. Working with communities to promote wide use of best practices to enable healthy living.
6. Making quality care more affordable for individuals, families, employers, and governments by developing and spreading new health care delivery models.

Patient Safety is one of the six national priorities identified by the National Quality Strategy (http://www.ahrq.gov/workingforquality/index.html).

Go to: National Quality Strategy Priority in Action: Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC.

National Quality Strategy Priority 1

The National Quality Strategy has identified three long-term goals related to patient safety: reduce preventable hospital admissions and readmissions, reduce the incidence of adverse health care-associated conditions, and reduce harm from inappropriate or unnecessary care.

This chartbook focuses on adverse health care-associated conditions and harm from care. Preventable admissions and readmissions can result from problems with patient safety or problems with care coordination. We have chosen to include measures of preventable admissions and readmissions in the Care Coordination chartbook.

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