At Novant Health, we support the nationwide effort to ensure that patients coming into the hospital with specific conditions receive recommended care. These recommendations are based on years of research on interventions that have been proven to improve outcomes for these conditions.

A serious safety event (SSE) is an incident that reaches the patient and causes moderate to severe harm or death as a result of a deviation from a generally accepted performance standard of care.

Every hospital in the U.S. has experienced events that resulted in death or serious injury to patients. Even those hospitals recognized as the best are not immune to serious safety events. Although we've made progress during the past several years to make our hospitals safer and have a low Serious Safety Event Rate, we still have work to do to ensure that we First, Do No Harm to our patients.

Many safety events involve human behaviors. At Novant, we are looking to address these behaviors with a new approach to safety called Know 5ive. Save Lives. The idea being that if staff focus on five key behaviors, we can reduce our serious safety event rate by 80 percent or more by the end of 2012. As Novant meets these goals, we will continue to lower our rate beyond 2012.

The five key behaviors are:

• Practice with a questioning attitude
• Communicate clearly
• Know & comply with red rules
• Self-check: Focus on task
• Support each other

We Want To Hear From You
We would like to know what you think of our Quality information. Let us know if you found this section helpful and easy to understand, or if there's any additional information you need but couldn't find. Contact Us