Category: Patient & Family Engagement

How Patient and Family Advisory Councils Can Help Hospitals and Their Communities During the COVID-19 Pandemic

American Institutes for Research (AIR) for IPRO HQIC

COVID-19 is a perfect issue for PFACs to address. The experiences of patients and families can have a direct impact on how the hospital safely treats those with severe cases including those in isolation, prevents the spread of the virus, and minimizes the impact of the virus on health care and health outcomes (e.g., delayed care). This resource provides suggestions about how PFACs can help hospitals proactively communicate, educate, and engage with patients and families and the larger community to build trust and deliver high-quality care during a time of uncertainty and fear.

All-Cause Harm Resource

IPRO HQIC

This resource explains what All-Cause Harm is, why it is important, and then dives into each of the processes it takes to prevent All-Cause Harm. Eight priority focus areas for the Hospital Quality Improvement Contract (HQIC) are illuminated and strategies to monitor compliance are provided.

All-Cause Harm Resource, Recording and Slides from the IPRO HQIC All-Cause Harm “launch” on March 29th, 2021.

Your Guide to Controlling & Managing Pain After Surgery

MHA Keystone Center

This resource provides education to patients related to:

  • Understanding surgical pain
  • Understanding pain after surgery
  • Questions to ask before surgery, after surgery and before discharge
  • Tools to help manage pain
  • Keeping track of pain medications and frequency
  • Common pain medication side effects

Conversation Guide to Improve COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake

IHI – Institute for Healthcare Improvement

This guide is intended to help health care staff and leaders have trust-building conversations about the COVID-19 vaccine, both at work and at home. Exploring people’s feelings about the vaccine through respectful, trust-building interactions over time offers the potential to increase the uptake of vaccinations. The guide helps health care staff and leaders begin to quickly engage in effective conversations about COVID-19 vaccination, enabling learning in practice and resolving issues that arise from such conversations. The focus is on having rich conversations to listen and learn about reasons and feelings for not getting vaccinated — and then seeking to have a dialogue about questions and concerns so that people can consider COVID-19 vaccination.

Antibiotic Resistance & Patient Safety Portal

Centers for Disease Control (CDC)

Interactive web-based application that was created to innovatively display data collected through CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN), the Antibiotic Resistance Laboratory Network (AR Lab Network), and other sources.  It offers enhanced data visualizations on Antibiotic Resistance, Use, and Stewardship datasets as well as Healthcare-Associated Infection (HAI) data.

STRIVE Infection Control Training

Centers for Disease Control (CDC)

The CDC/STRIVE curriculum was developed by national infection prevention experts led by the Health Research & Educational Trust (HRET) for CDC. Courses address both the technical and foundational elements of healthcare-associated infection (HAI) prevention. Courses can be taken in any order. Each course has 1 or more modules. Individual modules can be used for; new employee training, annual infection prevention training, and/or periodic training.

Providing Language Services to Diverse Populations: Lessons from the Field

Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Office of Minority Health (OMH)

Across the country, health care organizations are using innovative approaches to provide language assistance services to individuals with limited English proficiency. This resource discusses a number of approaches used by these organizations to provide language assistance services to persons with limited English proficiency based on the findings of case studies conducted with a variety of health care organizations.

Designing and Delivering Whole-Person Transitional Care; The Hospital Guide to Reducing Medicaid Readmissions

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)

Reducing readmissions is a national priority for payers, providers, and policymakers seeking to improve health care and lower costs. Readmissions are a significant issue among patients with Medicaid. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) commissioned this guide to identify ways evidence-based strategies to reduce readmissions can be adapted or expanded to better address the transitional care needs of the adult Medicaid population. The guide has been field tested by individual hospitals and groups of hospital quality improvement collaboratives. Based on a series of coaching and feedback calls with hospitals, the second release of this guide has been updated to provide updated tools and clearer guidance on who should use the tools and what to do with the output of the tools. It also offers new tools that can be used in the day-to-day working environment of hospital-based teams and cross-setting partnerships.

Hospital Guide to Reducing Medicaid Readmissions Toolbox

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)

Offers in depth information about the unique factors driving Medicaid readmissions and a step-by-step process for designing a locally relevant portfolio of strategies to reduce Medicaid readmissions. Toolkit includes patient and family interview process.