Building a stronger patient safety and quality improvement system

All people should always experience the safest, highest-quality, best-value healthcare across all settings. This paper analyses how, in keeping with its vision, The Joint Commission works with healthcare organisations to continuously improve healthcare quality and patient safety. It holds its accredited organisations to the highest standards by inspiring them to excel and achieve zero harm. To effectively help healthcare organisations positively transform, The Joint Commission shares with them its high-reliability framework for achieving zero harm. In addition, it provides strategies on how to reorganise healthcare organisations’ structures to integrate all improvement efforts, including performance improvement, infection control, regulatory, accreditation, patient safety and environmental services. The Joint Commission survey is designed to assess risk and identify potential harm that an identified risk poses to a healthcare organisation’s patients, staff and visitors. Healthcare leaders are provided with valuable tools and data analytics that prioritise risk and identify those areas that are most likely to lead to serious harm. Although all identified areas of risk must be addressed, these tools and analytics allow leaders to prioritise their resources and focus their initial efforts on areas that matter most. These electronic tools are available to healthcare systems regardless of size, and are of benefit to leaders in assessing those organisations that may need greater support and/or more resources to perform better. The Joint Commission has positioned itself as a leader in quality improvement and patient safety solely in order to partner with healthcare organisations to help them advance their improvement efforts while at the same time inspiring organisations to aim to eliminate all forms of harm.