Patient safety initiative gains support, funding

Researchers hope the combination of money and an interdisciplinary approach will mean success for the federal project.

By Andis Robeznieks, AMNews staff. Nov. 5, 2001.

Talk is cheap. Research isn't.

So it helps when research for issues such as improving patient safety and reducing medical errors can be funded to the tune of $50 million by the federal government.

The U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality is funneling $50 million into 94 different projects and studies this year with the aim of reducing the number of deaths caused by medical errors. (Conflicting reports place that number anywhere between 5,000 and 98,000 a year.)

AHRQ hopes to learn how errors occur and provide science-based improvement strategies for doctors' offices, hospitals, nursing homes and other health care settings.

This is not just another case of Washington throwing money at a problem to show its concern, according to Nancy Donaldson, RN.

"I think this is the federal government at its best," said Donaldson, who serves as an associate dean and associate clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Nursing. "I love that my tax dollars are going for this."

Donaldson said she often returns from Washington, D.C., "underimpressed," but her dealings with AHRQ have had the opposite effect. She said the agency has taken an interdisciplinary approach, while also mandating strict budgets and timelines.

"They want people to conduct the work in a cost-effective, expedited way," Donaldson said.

The AHRQ is providing her team of UCSF researchers with $394,068 this year to study the impacts of nurse workload, staffing ratios and skill mix on patient safety. The study will take two years and cost almost $700,000. [...]