Perfection

Our GBMC HealthCare system is working towards a vision of perfection. When we strive to give everyone the care that we would want for our own loved ones, every time, it is perfection that we are after. When I say this to people, I always add that we will never quite get to perfection because we are human and as good as we can make them - our systems will still be fallible.  There will always be at least a few holes in the “Swiss Cheese”. So when we do get to perfection, even if it is just for some subset of our patients on one parameter I am surprised and delighted!  

I am happy to report that Unit 58, our Joint and Spine Center inpatient unit, has achieved perfection in hand hygiene in January and for two of the last three months. The team, under the direction of nurse manager Conchetta Jackson, RN and medical director Lee Schmidt, MD are doing great things. In January, the secret auditor watched 45 separate incidents of a staff member walking in and out of a room and the individual cleansed his or her hands every single time! This is not easy! When people are busy it is very hard to not slip at least once in remembering to clean their hands so as to not spread germs from one patient to another…but they did it!

In addition, 5 different “disciplines” also had a perfect score in January. They were: Nutrition/Food Services, OT/PT, Phlebotomy, Radiology, and Volunteers. My hat is off to these colleagues who are doing great things to keep our patients safe.

Purple Baltimore

While I am congratulating folks, I would be remiss if I didn’t congratulate Ray Lewis, Joe Flacco, Anquan Boldin and the rest of the Ravens. It was a great game and although I would have preferred the game to have ended at halftime, I was delighted with the final score. I felt sorry for the people operating the Superdome, we at GBMC know what it is like  to deal with power outages!