Home > News Room > Federal grant to enhance patient safety at Memorial

Federal grant to enhance patient safety at Memorial

Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center has been awarded a $457,500 federal grant to develop an enhanced patient safety program in conjunction with the Dr. Melvin B. Dyster Family Medicine Residency program.

The grant will provide $152,500 per year for three years and will be administered by Ashok Singh, M.D., Principal Investigator and Don McLean M.S., M.A., the residency program’s director of behavioral sciences.  Also participating will be all the program’s faculty members.

Serving as consultants are Ranjit Singh, M.D., and Gurdev Singh, Ph.D., director of the Patient Safety Research Center at the University at Buffalo. Both are nationally and internationally known leaders in developing safety programs.

The three-year effort will develop and implement an interdisciplinary approach to patient safety using workshops, lectures and experiential activities as well as journaling and chart audits by residents and faculty members.  Objectives include improved team building, a reduction in inappropriately prescribed medications; enhanced communications with patients, families and clinical staff; and facilitated self-evaluation.
 
As these principles are implemented, they will be shared with other Memorial physicians and clinical staff members.

“Sustainable enhancements to patient safety can only be achieved through the establishment of a culture of safety,” said Gurdev Singh.  “Our goal is to establish such a culture at Memorial through careful analysis of system vulnerabilities and the development of a practice-based learning and improvement curriculum.”

The grant was awarded by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), which awarded only 29 grants for residency training thr