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USM Muskie School Partners With Goodall Hospital On Patient Safety Research

October 29 , 2007

The USM Muskie School, in partnership with Goodall Hospital in Sanford, will be undertaking a study to determine how to improve patient safety in smaller hospitals.

The Muskie School and Goodall Hospital have been awarded a $283,000, two-year patient safety research grant from the Connecticut-based Donaghue Foundation. The proposal was one of four selected for funding from nearly 40 applications. This is the first time the foundation has awarded a grant in Maine.

The grant will utilize Crew Resource Management (CRM) training in Goodall Hospital’s Emergency Department to enhance teamwork and patient safety. Other key features include development of a train-the-trainer system to ensure sustainability of the teachings, development of human resources and other organizational strategies to support teamwork, and broad dissemination of project results.

The Muskie School will study the implementation and impact of this project to identify whether and how teamwork training affects patient care and outcomes. According to Dr. Andrew Coburn, research professor at the Muskie School, Goodall’s teamwork training project is an important opportunity to study how we can improve patient safety in smaller hospitals, which have traditionally not benefited from large-scale patient safety initiatives and grant programs.

As part of the conditions of the grant, Goodall Hospital is required to publish the results of its grant-funded training, present those results at one national conference, and assist other hospitals in implementing CRM training at their facilities.

“The ability to take what we learn from this training and share it with other healthcare organizations in Maine and beyond is very exciting,” said Mary Finnegan, the hospital’s director of performance Improvement and one of the grant’s project directors.

Only four hospitals in New England were awarded grants from the Donaghue Foundation.  In addition to Goodall Hospital, other grant recipients are Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Danbury Hospital in Danbury, Connecticut, and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In total, the Donaghue Foundation has awarded $1,173,000 in grant funding to the four medical institutions.

The Patrick & Catherine Weldon Donaghue Medical Research Foundation (The Donaghue Foundation) was established by the will of Ethel Donaghue in memory of her parents. The Foundation is dedicated to furthering the search for medical knowledge of practical benefit to human life and to the quality of the lives of people. The Foundation focuses on initiatives to strengthen research on health issues, to promote future research leadership, and to put new knowledge to work for public benefit.  This is the first time the Foundation has awarded grants outside the state of Connecticut.

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