Giving Up Good to Become Great: Evolution of an OB Safety Program

Promoting safety and providing quality care in obstetrics remains paramount for healthcare providers and medical professional liability insurers alike. Developing a culture of safety through education and training was forefront in the efforts of a multi-hospital collaborative in New York City to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity in Obstetrics.

With approximately 36,000 deliveries occurring in their institutions annually, the four NYC hospitals in this collaborative embarked on the creation of an OB Safety Program, with the goals of preventing patient harm, reducing liability risk, and lowering medical malpractice costs. Through partnership with their medical malpractice carrier, over a ten-year period a myriad of best practice strategies were developed to improve patient safety by enhancing teamwork and communication, providing education in simulation and fetal monitoring, and improving provider documentation.

This session will outline the challenges encountered by the hospitals in this collaborative and illustrate the actions taken to reduce adverse outcomes in labor and delivery. The participants will learn how to recognize the risks involved, develop and implement risk reduction strategies, and assess the efficacy of the program.

Learning objectives:

• Describe the process of creating a labor and delivery clinical best practices program and the role of all clinicians involved.
• Recognize the necessary tools required to mitigate risk through education, research, and the implementation of structured quality improvement initiatives.
• Demonstrate how to use claims and adverse outcomes data to ensure risk reduction strategies are effective.