A Mission in Safety
Maintaining patient safety supports the Michigan Difference
 This summer, Darrell A. Campbell, Jr., M.D., chief of staff and senior associate director of University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers, received the prestigious 2005 Keystone Patient Safety & Quality Leadership Award from the Michigan Health & Hospital Association in recognition of his outstanding leadership efforts in patient safety and quality improvement.
"Our efforts are directed toward making sure that all UMHHC's clinicians and staff are vigilantly safety conscious," says Campbell. "This is a crucial step toward making our health system the safest academic medical center in the country."
As chief of staff in the Office of Clinical Affairs, Campbell champions a commitment to addressing all areas of high risk in patient safety and quality. He oversees various departments, including Risk Management, Patient Safety, Medical Information Services, Pharmacy Services and Medical Staff Services to ensure they work to maintain the highest level of patient care available by reducing medical errors and near misses, averting infections and injuries, ensuring a trained and credentialed medical staff and delivering the right care to the right person at the right time.
Under Campbell's leadership, Clinical Affairs has developed and implemented a number of important initiatives to directly link front-end patient safety information to improved safety and quality within the Health System, including:
Lawsuit risk reduction, such as encouraging clinical staff to talk openly and in a timely manner with patients and family members about problems or unanticipated outcomes and to apologize when warranted. This and other efforts have cut the number of lawsuits and claims, and saved the Hospitals and Health Centers millions of dollars in legal fees.
Peer-review system for physicians, which gives individual doctors data on their performance relative to other U-M practitioners so they can make changes or improvements.
A Medical Emergency Team pilot program in which specialized medical teams can be summoned at any time to help patients who show signs of imminent health problems such as breathing or heartbeat irregularities. This early intervention response program is meant to catch a problem before a patient "codes" or reaches crisis.
To learn more about these initiatives and other efforts, visit the OCA Web site.
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