Communications

(Sept. 20, 2024) – Each year, our partner, the Kansas Healthcare Collaborative, brings together clinical, quality, risk management and administrative leaders to educate and inspire improvements in quality and safety. This year's Summit on Quality was an exceptional example of leaders coming together to focus on systems issues and how we can all work together to improve safety and quality.

This year's keynote speaker, RaDonda Vaught, spoke of a devastating medical error resulting in a patient's death and changing the lives of the involved families and individuals irrevocably. Ms. Vaught detailed the environment and systems issues that resulted in a situation where this fatal medication error occurred, allowing attendees to reflect on how this could happen at any facility and inspiring attendees to evaluate their systems, processes and culture to improve patient safety and quality of care.

Following the keynote, the summit featured speakers who described how leaders can create a Just Culture; and develop restorative culture and peer support programs in their facilities.

A highlight of each annual summit is the Leadership in Quality Award program, sponsored by the KAMMCO Foundation. This year's Leadership in Quality Award winners are NMC Health in Newton and Logan County Health Services in Oakley.

NMC Health was recognized for its interdisciplinary approach to reducing health care-acquired C. Diff infections. This multi-year process improvement project to reduce Clostridioides difficile Infections resulted in a significant reduction in C. Diff infections after the addition of two-step testing, daily surveillance and re-education of clinical teams. The current outcome of this initiative at NMC Health is consistently zero HAI CDI for nine months.

Logan County Health Services was recognized for its achievement in reducing and preventing infections through antimicrobial stewardship. The Antimicrobial Stewardship team at Logan County Health Services initiated and expanded a comprehensive AS program to reduce and prevent infections throughout the facility. At the project's initiation, only 45 percent of the expected cultures were obtained before initiating antimicrobial therapy. Following nursing and provider education and buy-in, expected cultures have exceeded the goal of 90 percent.

We congratulate NMC Health and Logan County Health Services on their achievements and their teams' hard work in improving care and safety in their facilities. Learn more about these award-winning quality initiatives on the KHC website.

We applaud KHC for providing a high-quality and inspiring conference to improve care and safety in Kansas. This conference is one example of the types of quality education the Kansas Hospital Association and Kansas Medical Society envisioned when we partnered to found KHC 15 years ago. We appreciate our ongoing collaboration and the opportunity to support members jointly.

Thank you to the Summit on Quality sponsors, the KHC team, and most of all, our Kansas hospital attendees for the work that you do every day to improve care quality and safety in your facilities.
--Chad Austin