Helen DeVos Children's Hospital wins first annual Leape Ahead Award

The American College of Physician Executives (ACPE) is pleased to announce the selection of Helen DeVos Children's Hospital as the winner of the first annual Leape Ahead Award.

For the past four years, the 210-bed, tertiary care children's hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has led a transformative patient safety culture program that embodies the spirit of the award, which is aimed at medical schools and teaching hospitals making extraordinary strides in promoting a culture of leadership, professionalism, communication and teamwork among medical students and residents.

"Dr. Tom Peterson and his group designed an excellent institutional pediatric patient safety program that has led to measurable improvement in several vital areas of patient care," said Dr. Ingram Roberts, ACPE board member and a member of the Leape Ahead Selection Committee. "We are proud to select Helen DeVos Children's Hospital as the first recipient of this important award."

The initiative at Helen DeVos includes:

• Safety behavior education training for all staff, including physicians
• Full integration and collaboration between risk management and clinical staff
• New consistent coding and classification of serious safety events
• Adoption of new safety metrics
• Transparency of data and safety event details.

The hospital also developed a safety behavior residency curriculum that includes in-situ safety simulation training, safety unit rounding, quality improvement projects, advanced safety competencies and risk management training.

The results of this initiative have been significant. Since the program was initiated, the hospital experienced dramatic decreases in serious safety event rate and catheter-associated blood stream infections. Hand hygiene compliance rates remained above 95 percent for more than two years and they have not had a medication error that led to a serious event since 2008.

"The ACPE Leape Ahead award is by itself a leap ahead for ACPE and demonstrates the College's commitment to recognizing organizations that contribute to improving safety, quality and efficiency in health care," said Dr. Peter Angood, CEO of ACPE. "The staff of the Helen DeVos Children's Hospital is to be commended for their outstanding program."

The Leape Ahead Award was created by ACPE to recognize those who create innovative and original projects that lead to a safer and higher quality environment for health care. The award honors the extraordinary dedication and commitment of Dr. Lucian Leape, whose leadership has advanced the efficient, effective and caring delivery of medicine in the U.S. Dr. Leape is an outspoken advocate of the non-punitive systems approach to the prevention of medical errors and has written widely about the need to make patient safety a national priority.