Hospitals Work to Improve Patient Safety Every Day

Hospitals and health systems across the country vary in size, as well as the types of services and specialties they offer. They also offer many different programs to meet the unique needs of the communities they serve.

But the common thread binding all hospitals and health systems together is their unwavering dedication to putting patient safety and quality first.

From boardroom to bedside and every point in between, hospitals are committed to establishing a culture of safety designed to minimize risks, prevent errors and deliver high-quality care. This relentless focus is why we continue to show advancements in the patient experience of care and in patient outcomes.

This week, AHA and Vizient released a report showing improved patient surgical outcomes across major indicators over the five-year period from 2019 to 2024. 

During this time, significant improvement was seen not only in better patient safety metrics such as reductions in infections and falls — but also with marked declines in three major surgical patient safety indicators: severe bleeding, sepsis and respiratory failure.

The new findings build on a report AHA released in collaboration with Vizient last year showing that hospitals and health systems performed better on key patient safety and quality measures in the first quarter of 2024 than they did in 2019. In fact, hospitals’ efforts to improve safety led to 200,000 Americans hospitalized between April 2023 and March 2024 surviving episodes of care they wouldn’t have in 2019.

Hospitals and health systems across the nation are making these improvements by implementing effective, innovative programs that are advancing a culture of safety, improving staff well-being and connecting with the patients and communities they serve. Please visit AHA’s webpage to see examples of these programs.

The stories are a part of AHA’s Patient Safety Initiative, which was launched in 2023 to catalyze, convene and connect hospitals around patient safety while elevating stories of success and strategies for continued improvement.

As part of these efforts, the AHA continues to develop and share tools, resources and strategies with hospitals so they can learn from all the tremendous work happening in the field.

For example, AHA recently announced a collaboration with the health care technology company Epic to help more hospitals adopt a set of tools to aid in the detection and treatment of postpartum hemorrhage — a serious and potentially life-threatening complication of childbirth that accounts for 11% of maternal deaths in the United States.

In addition, we released a toolkit with Ochsner Health — a system at the forefront of implementing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Hospital Sepsis Program Core Elements framework — highlighting how systemwide coordination and team-based practices are improving sepsis outcomes.

Keeping patients safe, delivering quality care and advancing health are at the core of everything hospitals and health systems do. While our field continues to make progress on advancing safety and quality, we know there is always more work to do. Hospitals and health systems will always keep working to deliver the safest and highest quality care to all patients