The Southern California Perinatal Patient Safety Project

2005 Lawrence Transfer Award Winner

Jean Sandoval, RN, MSN; Janice McDonald, RN, MBA; Suzanne Graham, RN, PhD

Summer 2006 - Volume 10 Number 2

The Northern California Perinatal Patient Safety Project (PPSP) won the Lawrence Patient Safety New Project Award in 2004 (See "The Perinatal Patient Safety Project: New Can Be Great!" in The Permanente Journal 2005 Winter;9(1):25-7 and "Perinatal Patient Safety Project" in The Permanente Journal 2005 Spring;9(2):28-33). With the purpose to create high-reliability perinatal units through the use of human factors, techniques and systems improvements, the project borrowed from the United States Navy, NASA, and similar organizations that operate highly complex systems with few errors over long periods of time. Using the precepts of the "Four As of Adoption" (see "Practical Steps for Practice Transfer" in The Permanente Journal 2005 Fall;9(4):50-1), Southern California began implementation of PPSP in November 2003 at the Riverside Medical Center by administering the Safety Attitude Questionnaire (SAQ) to their Perinatal staff and physicians and initiated their PPSP Steering Committee to begin the planning process. The other nine Medical Centers began cyclical implementation in 2004.