Quality People Drive Quality Performance at Bay Pines VA
Across Bay Pines VA Healthcare System, healthcare quality means ensuring Veterans receive world-class care, and that can only be achieved through becoming a High Reliability Organization (HRO).
The leader championing HRO at Bay Pines VA is Dr. Joann Badget, who serves as the chief of Quality Systems.
The mission of Bay Pines VA’s Quality Systems is to cultivate high reliability principles and foster a Veteran-centric environment that encourages creative thinking, collaboration, employee engagement, and transparency.
“Bay Pines Quality Systems staff are here to partner with you to improve the quality and patient safety that is so crucial to our national heroes,” said Badget. “We are committed to operationalizing our high reliability journey to ensure we maintain the high standards our Veterans deserve.”
Quality Systems has a large mission that is only achieved due to the commitment of several services. These sections include the Accreditation Program/Improvement Nurses; the External Peer Review Program; Patient Safety Improvement Program; Peer Review Program; Risk Management Program; Systems Redesign Program; Cancer Registry Program; High Reliability Organizational Program and the Policy Coordinator.
“The teams within the Quality Systems Program are staffed with a dedicated and diverse group of people who ensure Veterans receive the highest standard of care,” said Bay Pines VA Systems Redesign Program Analyst Chelsey Armendinger.
The members of the Quality Systems team are here to either lead, facilitate, mentor, or support the different areas as they implement improvement ideas.
“This is not a one-person team,” continued Badget. “Everyone is a valuable member who helps implement improvements. From my team to the staff in the different services, everyone is important.”
Throughout the last year, the Quality Systems team contributed to the growth of several areas within Bay Pines VA. According to Badget, the Quality Systems team do not own any of the projects, but they aid various services as they work to enhance their operations. An example of this is the creation of a Nursing Pre-Surgical Checklist, which increased the accurate completion of operating room pre-procedure notes from 10 percent to 100 percent. Additionally, Quality Systems Service and Bay Pines implemented Safety Huddles utilizing the Visual Management systems in 17 areas across three sites. This was, in part, accomplished by the guidance of the HRO lead and Systems Redesign working with the services to develop the integrated/interoperative huddle board system and educating and mentoring the services to proficiently use the boards and effectively weave into the culture of the organization.
“Because of the contributions of our Quality Service team, we are able to share our strong practices and lessons learned with other healthcare systems at the Veterans Integrated Services Networks (VISN) Consortium,” said Badget. “We shared three best practices related to HRO and, of those, two were shared within VISN 8 and one practice was shared nationally.”
Additionally, the Quality Systems HRO Lead collaborated with multidisciplinary teams across the organization and met or exceeded expectations for program goals throughout the year.
As they look toward the future, Quality Systems looks forward to operationalizing Bay Pines VA’s HRO journey by enhancing the culture and competence in staff engagement, further improving our safety huddles; consistently conducting leader rounding; build better systems and fostering a just culture for Veterans and staff.
“The people working in Quality Systems are no longer the best kept secret in the VA,” said Armendinger. “They are the people who will help drive change that will result in lower-cost, high quality and safer health care for the Veterans we serve.”