June 20, 2008

Excellence every day

Excellence in patient care and safety, which includes compliance with Joint Commission standards, is a hospitalwide priority that benefits patients and their families and defines the work of MGH staff and employees. To promote the ongoing focus on quality and safety, the MGH Joint Commission Communications Subcommittee — a subgroup of the MGH Joint Commission Operations Committee — will be launching an "Excellence Every Day" campaign. The initiative promotes Joint Commission readiness and aims to assist managers and supervisors in promoting quality and safety topics directly to their staff.

Results from a recent survey indicated that employees rate staff meetings and announcements from their managers as most effective in communicating key messages. With this in mind and sporting a new "Excellence Every Day" logo — which will be unveiled in the coming weeks on the first of a series of Joint Commission readiness posters —  the campaign will include several helpful components for supervisors to communicate quality and safety information to their staff. These include a toolkit to facilitate communication about priority compliance topics, a revamped FYI paper and poster campaign and a redesigned Joint Commission intranet site where managers and supervisors can find compliance "hot topics" and other useful tools to equip their staff with the tools to practice excellence every day.

On June 16, the window of opportunity for the Joint Commission to survey the MGH opened. As the "Excellence Every Day" campaign unfolds, more information will be included in upcoming issues of MGH Hotline. For questions, contact Joint Commission Communications Subcommittee co-chairs Akin Demehin at ademehin@partners.org or Suzanne Kim at skim41@partners.org.