Our Culture of Safety

ECHN, along with all Connecticut hospitals, set themselves apart by leading the nation with a High Reliability Organization model to eliminate all-cause preventable harm using high reliability science and training to create a culture of safety. High reliability organizations reduce the number of serious safety events by focusing on key behaviors and improving system reliability. Through extensive training and hands-on interactive workshops, all employees, providers and leaders seek ways to constantly develop skills and learning to use practical tools that will enable us to create a culture of safety and fix systemic problems that lead to patient harm, decreasing events of preventable harm.

Organizational Efforts

We have implemented the following organizational efforts to support our culture of safety and our goal of zero preventable harm:

• Clinical staff gather each day for a safety “huddle” to review schedule and important patient safety considerations.
• Unit managers and staff have employed standardized tools and processes to improve safety practices across ECHN.
• CEO Deborah Weymouth and other leadership visit clinical areas weekly to reinforce safety behaviors with frontline staff and discuss processes that are working well and opportunities for improvement.