Mayo Clinic 2010 Annual Report
'Chasing Zero: Winning the War on Healthcare Harm'
Putting patient safety first
"Chasing Zero: Winning the War on Healthcare Harm" is a documentary that features Mayo Clinic and a number of other health care organizations committed to achieving the utmost in patient safety. Hosted by actor Dennis Quaid, the documentary is a call to action for health care leaders to invest in patient safety. Quaid uses the near-death experience of his infant twins that resulted from a medication error as a way of engaging audiences to act on patient safety in their own communities and hospitals.
Through compelling stories of preventable health care harm, "Chasing Zero" looks at medication management, health care-associated infections, health-information technologies, safety leadership and high-performance solutions. Each story opens with a challenge and then tells how caregivers overcame that challenge with health care practices that every organization can adopt.
Stephen Swensen, M.D., Mayo Clinic's Quality physician leader, oversaw Mayo's involvement in the documentary. Mayo examples highlighted in the documentary include Mayo's "Scrub the Hub," an innovative technique to reduce central line bloodstream infections, and Mayo's ongoing teamwork between nursing and environmental services staff to reduce bacterial counts on contact surfaces.
The documentary was created by the Texas Medical Institute of Technology for hospital leaders, including the governance board, executive officers, management team, safety leaders, nurses, physicians and patients who want to know how to make the hospital environment safer. The documentary originally aired in the spring of 2010 on the Discovery Channel.