Director, Patient Safety

It's more than a career, it's a calling.

MO-SSM Health Mission Hill

Worker Type: Regular

Job Highlights:

Named 150 Top Places to Work in Healthcare 2023 - Becker's Healthcare

Named One of America's Greatest Workplaces for Diversity 2023 - Newsweek

Named One of America's Greatest Workplaces for Women 2023, 2024 - Newsweek

SSM Health is a Catholic, not-for-profit health system serving the comprehensive health needs of communities across the Midwest through a robust and fully integrated health care delivery system. The organization’s 40,000 team members and more than 12,800 providers are committed to providing exceptional health care services and revealing God’s healing presence to everyone they serve.
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With care delivery sites in Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma and Wisconsin, SSM Health includes 23 hospitals, more than 300 physician offices and other outpatient and virtual care services, 13 post-acute facilities, comprehensive home care and hospice services, a pharmacy benefit company, a health insurance company and an accountable care organization. It is one of the largest employers in every community it serves.

To request additional information, confidentially submit your interest, or nominate a fellow colleague, please contact:

Jon Dirksen

Executive Talent Acquisition

jon.dirksen@ssmhealth.com

Job Summary:

Plans and directs the patient safety program for system across all care sites. Facilitates patient safety efforts and coaches' others in the development of patient safety improvement capabilities with emphasis on process redesign and measurement. Highly organized, data-driven, and practical with a solid foundation in improvement science. Works with all levels of the organization, including system and regional leaders to build patient safety literacy and develop an organization-wide approach to continuous patient safety improvement to achieve patient safety goals.

Job Responsibilities and Requirements:

Primary Responsibilities

• Reduces the risk for harm to patients in all care settings through the development of a strong patient safety culture in which everyone recognizes and reports potential harm and harm events. Visibility of harm will allow the organization to develop safer processes through causal analysis, thus, reducing the likelihood of future harm.
• Implements a standardized safety event reporting platform across all care settings with visibility of great catches, near misses and serious safety events for all employees.
• Serves as deep subject matter expert: expertise of just culture, causal analysis, classification of safety events, human factors, failure modes, and performance improvement.
• Trains and coaches' safety specialists in the development of patient safety improvement capabilities with an emphasis on process redesign, including the ability to perform appropriate causal analysis of safety events, and partnership with work group facilitators.
• Observes signals from safety event data to develop proactive mitigation measures to prevent Serious Safety Events (SSE).
• Maintains awareness and knowledge of best practice strategies, disseminating information to relevant groups. including working knowledge of various committee operations to assess and ensure essential requirements are met and best practices are identified and shared.
• Leads or participates in system, regional and ministry meetings, as assigned, promoting system-wide alignment.
• Develops a Serious Safety Event Rate (SSER) to measure patient safety improvement and outline system strategies to decrease SSER; work collaboratively with Patient Safety Organization (PSO) to streamline reporting, assess trends, and define Opportunities for Improvement (OFI) in participation with other PSO clients.
• Presents educational programs or assist in the development of educational materials related to clinical areas of expertise/improvement efforts. Educates and trains leadership, staff and physicians regarding the quality and patient safety program and their respective responsibilities in carrying out the program. Advises departments on designing quality improvement and patient safety initiatives, policies, and protocols.
• Ensures standardization of the type of patient safety events reported to the system. Reviews all patient safety events reported to the system with analysis of trends and identify opportunities for improvement.
• Reviews and maintains Action Plans identifying appropriate events to spread to other regions. Facilitate changes to processes and procedures and monitor to ensure effectiveness and sustainability over time. Identifies opportunities for improvements in patient safety and ensures action plans are completed and implemented in a timely fashion.
• Works with departments to mitigate the immediate risks to patients as a result of human or systems errors through various cause analysis approaches. Work with Risk Management to evaluate trends with identification of systems opportunities that lead to patient harm, in addition to leading efforts for systems improvement to prevent such harms. Supports improvement efforts by facilitating cause analysis teams.
• Coordinates the FMEA (Failure Mode Effects Analysis) process and other patient safety tools such as patient safety risk assessments, when appropriate.
• Performs other duties as assigned.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree

Experience

• Seven years' experience, with five years in direct people management/leadership

Department: 8750000033 Chief Clinical Officer

Work Shift: Day Shift (United States of America)

Scheduled Weekly Hours: 40

SSM Health is an equal opportunity employer. SSM Health does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. Click here to learn more.

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