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Article Date: 11/15/2007

Six countries meet on WHO’s “High 5s” Project to improve patient safety in hospitals
In a unique display of international patient safety collaboration, the top health leaders from Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States met on November 1 in Washington, D.C. to sign a letter of intent to support efforts to advance the global patient safety agenda through engagement in a special World Health Organization (WHO) Action on Patient Safety Initiative. The collaborative initiative, known familiarly as the High 5s Project, seeks to improve the safety of patients around the world. The Project is being coordinated by the WHO Collaborating Centre, which is led by The Joint Commission and Joint Commission International, in partnership with the WHO World Alliance for Patient Safety and the Commonwealth Fund. The centerpiece of the High 5s Project involves the development and implementation of standardized operating protocols (SOPs) to address five widespread patient safety problems in the participating countries and elsewhere. The SOPs will seek to:
Promote effective management of concentrated injectable medicines.
Assure medication accuracy at transitions in care.
Improve communications during patient care handovers.
Assure performance of the correct procedure at the correct body site.
Promote improved hand hygiene to prevent healthcare-associated infections.
Four of the five SOPs have been finalized and approved by the participating countries. The fifth will be finalized within the next month. Once in place, the SOPs are expected to have broad impacts in preventing avoidable deaths and serious injuries in hospitals. The Project also involves the elaboration of a sophisticated impact evaluation strategy that will assess not only the degree to which patient safety vulnerabilities have been eliminated but also the economic and cultural impacts of the SOPs at the hospital level. Project implementation is targeted for late summer of 2008, with the expectation that its impacts will be assessed over a five-year period. Volunteer hospitals will be invited to share their experiences and lessons learned with each other over time through an electronic learning community. It is anticipated that the learning experience will lead to continuing refinements to the SOPs over the project period. More information about the High 5s project is at http://www.jcipatientsafety.org/.

Website Address: http://www.jointcommission.org

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