Despite the COVID pandemic, the Denali Center, a 90-bed comprehensive short- and long-term care facility located adjacent to Fairbanks Memorial Hospital and part of the Foundation Health Partners system in Fairbanks, reinforced a unique culture of safety by focusing on its Good Catch Program, which led to a 50% reduction in falls over two years.
The Good Catch campaign was launched in 2019 as an incentive-based program that fostered a culture of safety by encouraging the recognition and reporting of risk before an event occurred. The program offered opportunities for staff to significantly increase near-miss reporting, revealing process and system vulnerabilities, and developing and implementing proactive data-driven improvement activities. Further enhancements streamlined real-time reporting and made it available 24/7.
"We've been changing the culture and dialogue around safety and quality to be a proactive program instead of a reactive program," explains Tina Rein, the Denali Center's Director of Nursing. "So instead of a fall happening and putting systems and processes in place to prevent them from happening again, we were able to put a program in place that really celebrated staff that found safety concerns and near misses and then report those and share them with the team so other areas in the facility could learn from those events. I'm really proud of the team."
Congratulations to the Denali Center team!