Finally, a program that can 'sustain the gain': A special report in Hospital Infection Control & Prevention

January 12th, 2015

Michael Tooke, MD

Infection preventionists are all too familiar with the wildly successful program that inevitably loses energy and fades back to baseline levels. That is not the case with the Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program (CUSP), say clinicians who have adopted the approach to prevent infections and other patient harms.

“Success is a rocket fuel,” says Michael Tooke, MD, chief medical officer at Memorial Hospital in Easton, MD. Tooke said. “I can’t emphasize how important it is to get the results back in the hands of the unit. When you have success — when you go for an entire month [with no infections] or 100 days, six months —some have gone a year. People own that and they are proud of it. They realize they are taking care of patients. Feeding back those results is crucial. It gets people’s attention and then you can use that success to go on to another issue and say, ‘Look it worked here, let’s try it here.’ It sustains itself, it really does.”

Inspired by the death of a single patient more than a decade ago, CUSP culture change is revolutionizing patient safety.

Don't miss our special report in the October 2012 issue of Hospital Infection Control and Prevention.