The purpose of this program seeks to improve collaborative patient safety activities in our community through leadership development. In this program we seek to build a patient safety leadership network to:

1. Enhance the number of health care leaders who are focused on improving patient safety in the greater Chicago Metropolitan Area,
2. Increase the level of interactions among leadership in patient safety in our community, and
3. Support the planning of new and innovative multi-institutional patient safety activities among Chicago area health care institutions.

This initiative's goal would be to develop leadership in patient safety across the health profession spectrum including but not limited to physicians, nurses, pharmacists, physical therapists, laboratory, x-ray technicians, researchers and consumers.

The core of the Patient Safety Leadership Network will be to conduct a series of workgroup/roundtable discussions with Chicago-area leadership in 2008 and 2009 among a number of key clinical and non-clinical areas related to patient safety. Examples of the workgroup include: Hospital leadership: Chief Executive Officers, Chief Medical Officers, Chief Nursing Officers, Leadership in Emergency Departments, etc. It would also include medical directors and medical practice management staff from large physician group practices as well as Medical School Deans, Nursing School Deans, Long Term Care Center Directors, Health Plan Directors, Community Leadership.

At each of these workgroup meetings we will ask the participants to discuss their current institutional efforts in the area of patient safety, and then focus the discussion as to possible opportunities for major improvement in Chicago-area patient safety through inter-institutional and inter-disciplinary programs.

A pilot meeting consisting of C-level executives was conducted at CPSF's 2007 Annual Scientific Meeting to universal approval. Follow-up meetings for specific disciplines are planned. Future multi-disciplinary meetings of healthcare executives will be held at our annual meetings.

The first meeting of CMO's was held Sept 14, 2007 at MacNeal Hospital.

CQPS/CPSF hosted another full C-Suite roundtable discussion at the CPSF 2008 Annual Scientific Meeting with follow-up phone conferences in 2008.

A nursing and patient safety meeting is in the planning stages in collaboration with Illinois Organization of Nurse Leaders.

The engagement of senior leaders and Medical Directors in this process also served to integrate them into our organization and several served on our 2008 Steering Committee (Governing Body) which completed a comprehensive organizational evaluation and reorganization. As a result, the Coalition for Quality and Patient Safety (CQPS) has been launched as the successor organization to CPSF.

CQPS, focused on quality as well as patient safety, and its recent listing as a Patient Safety Organization (PSO) by the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, will provide many collaborative learning opportunities, task forces, and interest groups where "Leadership Network" members can participate and lead. Newly implemented PSO regulations allow patient safety and quality information to be shared freely among healthcare institutions in a federally-protected and confidential environment. We believe this will lead to unprecedented collaboration, joint problem solving and multi-institutional improvement efforts and also the growth of "Leadership Network" contacts and effective engagements.

This initiative was supported by a grant from: