Winona Health supports Time Out for every patient, every time

Patients in Winona can be assured their healthcare providers take every precaution to ensure safe surgical procedures and safety for every patient. Prior to the start of every surgical procedure, the Winona Health surgical team, including an anesthesiologist and surgeon, pause to confirm that the patient, the surgical site, and the procedure are all correct. The pause is called “Time Out.” “Even though we haven’t had a wrong-site surgical error here at Winona Health, we continue to adopt research-based best practices to help ensure that it never happens,” said Heather Matejka, director of Surgical Services at Winona  Health. “Winona Health implemented this time out process more than 10 years ago, and we go through this safety check for every patient, every time.” A recent report by The Joint Commission indicates errors such as wrong patient, wrong surgery site and wrong procedure were the third most frequent sentinel event in 2010. The Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN) launched National Time Out Day in 2004 to support the protocol and build greater awareness among surgical team members. Its goal is to prevent errors by ensuring all physicians, nurses, and surgical technologists pause before all invasive procedures so they can communicate as a group and confirm key information about the patient and procedure. As further evidence of Winona Health’s exceptional safety procedures, the Surgery Department recently earned a Minnesota Hospital Association (MHA) Patient Safety Excellence Award for implementing documented best practices around both the counting of and accounting for all items used during invasive procedures. The recommended actions are compiled in the SAFE ACCOUNT Roadmap to Preventing Retained Objects in the O.R. The MHA Patient Safety Excellence Award is given to facilities that have achieved implementation of more than 90 percent of the recommended actions. “The entire Surgery Department staff is involved in implementing the best practice guidelines,” said Matejka. “Patient safety is our highest priority, and each surgical case requires constant, diligent focus on every detail of a procedure. Our staff has an excellent process in place to ensure safety.” The Time Out campaign is led by the Minnesota Safe Surgery Coalition. Founding partners of the coalition are: the MHA, the Minnesota Department of Health, the Minnesota Medical Association, the Minnesota Medical Group Management Association and the MMIC Group, formerly the Minnesota Medical Insurance Exchange. For more information about Winona Health, visit the Quality and Safety page of our website.