Registration for the 14th Annual Patient Safety & Quality Symposium featuring “The Road to Highly Reliable Care is Paved with Thoughtful Processes and Purposeful Performance” is now open. This year’s program is sponsored by Barnes-Jewish Hospital, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis Children’s Hospital, BJC HealthCare, Barnes-Jewish Hospital Center for Practice Excellence and The Foundation for Barnes-Jewish Hospital.

The nature of health care inherently creates ongoing opportunities for improvement. These opportunities exist for multiple reasons including, complexity of care provided, staffing shortages, supply issues and human error, combined with the constant variable of serving unique individuals (patients). These opportunities also exist because health care professionals want and strive to offer the best care possible for every patient.

So, how do health care professionals and organizations seize opportunities in the most efficient ways possible to reach and sustain high reliability?

This year’s Symposium encourages us to:

• Step back, sometimes broadly, and sometimes narrowly, to define the problems we face.
• Retrace our steps, figuratively speaking, to lend more insight into cultivating a more efficient process.
• Incorporate human factor principles to develop system fixes that resolve safety issues, as well as those pesky annoyances that bother end users daily.
• Recognize the work being done by Patient Family Advisory Councils around the state and how their insights and programs lead to enhanced quality and safety.
• Be cognizant of the political landscape at the national and state levels in terms of health and health policy.

Registration and abstract submission information available here.