On-Demand Learning Lab - Advancing Patient Safety: Insights to Meet Leapfrog Standards-April 2025 Learning Lab

April 2025 Learning Lab - Slide Deck

Pdf Summary

The document outlines how healthcare organizations can integrate the Patient Safety Domain of the NAHQ Healthcare Quality Competency Framework to better meet Leapfrog Hospital Safety Survey standards, including proposed 2025 updates. It emphasizes assessing and strengthening patient safety culture by ensuring safety is consistently prioritized, embedded in daily work and leadership conversations, and measured through routine Culture of Safety surveys for employees and medical staff—followed by clear action on results.<br /><br />It also highlights applying safety science using data-driven, empirical methods and incorporating high reliability principles and human factors engineering into everyday workflows. Organizations should maintain formal processes to analyze performance, share outcomes transparently, and drive continuous improvement.<br /><br />Another key competency is having clear organizational procedures to identify, confidentially report, and communicate patient safety risks and events, supported by established forums/committees with the right stakeholders involved. Collaboration is essential: teams should validate data, convert it into usable information, apply standard performance improvement tools, and create actionable plans with assigned accountability.<br /><br />The overview includes Leapfrog’s role in collecting and publicly reporting hospital safety and quality data for over 25 years, and notes the Hospital Survey’s nine sections spanning topics such as medication safety, staffing, patient safety practices, and serious error management. The survey focuses on safety structures and processes and is regularly updated.<br /><br />Proposed 2025 survey changes include splitting ICU physician staffing (Section 5) into two publicly reported measures—adult and pediatric ICU staffing—though only the adult measure will affect the Hospital Safety Grade methodology. Leapfrog is also adding optional “fact-finding” measures on emergency department boarding, recognizing its association with delayed care, medication errors, increased morbidity/mortality, longer length of stay, and poorer patient satisfaction. These optional measures include the percent of admitted ED patients boarded 4 hours or less and the average ED length of stay for admitted patients.

Keywords

NAHQ Healthcare Quality Competency Framework

Patient Safety Domain

Leapfrog Hospital Safety Survey

Hospital Safety Grade

patient safety culture

Culture of Safety survey

high reliability principles

human factors engineering

safety event reporting

ED boarding measures (2025 update)