It’s a rather remarkable turn-around story…
For those who don’t know there’s a patient-safety organization, called The Leapfrog Group, that grades hospitals on their patient safety. Six years ago, in 2015, the JPS hospital (a county-owned hospital in Ft. Worth, TX) received a “D” grade on patient safety. This year, in 2021, the same hospital received an “A” grade on patient safety.
Public hospitals are rarely at the top of the patient safety grading curve, but JPS has bucked that trend. At GRC we’ve been fortunate enough to have a window into the hospital’s MRI safety improvements over the past four years, and have witnessed transformations in policy, practice, culture, and training. Several years ago the lack of trust between and among techs, management, and radiologists (to say nothing of external departments) really inhibited the change that was needed to embrace MRI safety best practices.
In the past several years however, rock-star safety leadership (both at enterprise and radiology departmental levels) turned JPS into an MRI safety rock-star of a provider. Through advanced training, reworked policies & procedures, and giving reign to young professionals with passion for expanding MRI safety and patient care, JPS is not merely MRI-safety-skilled, they’re advancing the profession.
Public hospitals often have an incredibly-diverse patient population, always presenting new conditions and new complications to the care team. In this regard, JPS is no different. It’s despite these persistent operational challenges that JPS made great leaps forward in patient safety everywhere in the hospital, including in MRI / radiology.
The Leapfrog Group doesn’t measure MRI safety, specifically, so we at GRC can’t claim that our work with JPS on MRI safety played even the smallest part in their recent “A” grade, but we do see the enterprise-level focus on patient safety having been an important part in the improvements that were possible within MRI.
To JPS Hospital, and Dr. Stephenson in particular, we offer our most sincere congratulations on this monumental achievement! And to the radiology and MRI administration, radiologists, and staff, even if your work wasn’t counted, directly, by Leapfrog for the hospital’s grade, we all know that MRI safety has seen improvement on a similar scale. There’s still more to do, but you should all be tremendously proud of what you’ve accomplished, so far.
For more information on the MRI safety services GRC offers to our clients, we invite you to check out our MRI safety services for healthcare page.