Objective: The objective of this article was to provide a guide to health care providers on patient and family involvement in health care. Methods: This article evaluated the latest published studies for patient and family involvement and reexamined the objectives, the requirements for achieving these objectives, and the evidence of how to involve patients and families. Results: Critical components for patient safety include changing the organizational culture; including patients and families on teams; listening to patients and families; incorporating their input into leadership structures and systems; providing full detail about treatment, procedures, and medication adverse effects; involving them on patient safety and performance improvement committees; and disclosing medical errors. Conclusions: The conclusion of this article is that, for the future, patient and family involvement starts with educating patients and families and ends with listening to them and taking them seriously. If patient and family input is emphatically built into systems of performance improvement, and if patients and families are taken seriously and are respected for their valuable perspectives about how care can be improved, then organizations can improve at improving. Resources in health care are in short supply, yet the resources of patient and family help and time are almost limitless, are ready to be tapped, and can have a huge impact on improving the reliability and overall success for any health care organization.

OBJECTIVES:Leaders representing healthcare quality, purchasing, and certifying sectors convened at a national leadership meeting to address the issue of Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAIs). A session entitled "The Quality Choir: A Call to Action For Hospital Executives" featured harmonization partner organizations for the National Quality Forum Safe Practices (SPs) for Better Healthcare-2009 Update. (NQF SPs) The objective of the meeting was to determine if zero HAIs should be the improvement target for hospitals and what a Chasing Zero Department (CZD) should be like.METHODS:Discussion and consensus building among these experts determined what a CZD would look like and what it would take to implement it.RESULTS:Given that zero HAIs must be the goal, Hospital Infection Control Departments need to be restructured.CONCLUSION:Key design issues to the CZD addresses leadership, resources, and systems. Leadership: CEOs and boards must communicate to the organization that the typical Infection Control Group might be restructured into a CZD. The leader must provide "will, ideas and execution," recognize the power of collaboration, provide funding, and establish a roadmap through use of NQF SPs.RESOURCES:Funding for these efforts must be provided. Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) need to understand that zero HAIs will preserve revenue. Systems: Change can be made through leaders' championship, use of SPs, performing improvement, information flow and Automated Infection Identification and Mitigation System (AIIMS). These are the key to systems change toward zero HAIs.

OBJECTIVES:Leaders from healthcare quality, purchasing, and certifying sectors convened at a national leadership meeting held September 8-9, 2008 in Washington, DC to address issues of Hospital-Acquired Infections (HAIs). This paper provides opinion interviews from leaders who spoke at a session entitled "The Quality Choir: A Call to Action For Hospital Executives" on whether zero HAIs should be the goal of our Hospitals.METHODS:The successes of many hospitals in dramatically reducing their infection rates were examined toward goals of "Chasing Zero" infections.RESULTS:They agreed that the rhetoric of Chasing Zero HAIs must become reality, that anything less than aspiring to eradicate the risk of giving infections to patients for whom we deliver care is unacceptable.CONCLUSION:Every hospital leader must re-evaluate the strategy, structure, and function of their infection control and prevention services toward the following parameters: Zero HAIs must be the goal. Purchasers will no longer wait for hospital losses to act. Forces of harmonization are an unprecedented force. New-found hospitals' harmonized standards can move from "playing defense" to "playing offense" against HAIs. Leaders must ignite the passion of teams to make rhetoric a reality. Real stories about real people communicate through real caregiver values. The power trio of governance, administrative, and medical leaders must turn their potential energy into action. We have the "what" we need to aim for, the "how" to get the job done, and it is now about engaging the "who" to seize the opportunity. Embrace champions to lead the charge.