| | Safety Collaborative for the Outpatient Environment (SCOPE)
 Ambulatory Patient Safety Toolkit
The assessment tools and project summaries available through the left menu were developed to help medical providers evaluate their offices’ practices in identified structural and process measures that relate to patient safety. There is no guarantee that the following subjects represent the most important measures for your practice. There is also no guarantee that the medical practice that studies all of these parameters and reaches 100 percent compliance with all the measures will not suffer a medical error. However, these tools have been identified as methods of improving patient safety by various organizations.
Hopefully, these recommendations will serve as the impetus for an assessment and a development of practices that enhance or improve patient safety in any clinic or medical practice. Some categories may seem appropriate for your organization and some may not, depending on the size and style of your practice. Clinics with surgical departments have certain additional responsibilities. Each clinic should look at the examples provided to determine the best approach to take in their setting.
In a large clinic with multiple departments, it might be useful to demonstrate progress using a Best Practice Grid. This allows for a visual display of the status of all categories for each department. Even medium-sized clinics may have divisions, such as the "east and west hall," or the surgery department. Smaller clinics might not find this tool useful, but might want to develop a set of "thermometers" or a "dashboard of gauges" to provide an easy visual demonstration of progress.
Sometimes, it is important to "look over someone’s shoulder" to see how they performed the assessments and developed projects. As part of Gundersen Lutheran’s involvement in the Safety Collaborative for the OutPatient Environment (SCOPE) with 19 other medical centers, we organized a mini-collaborative of seven regional sites. Throughout this toolkit, brief narratives describe how participants used the tools to improve patient safety.
Appendixes A and B represent two project proposals that were rejected by the participants of this project. They may serve as useful tools for medical centers in other situations. You may identify other projects or other approaches that would prove more useful. Please feel free to customize these tools to your liking. |