As people who take care of people, nothing – absolutely nothing – bothers us more than making mistakes in your care. We hate the fact that the care we give is not always as good as we want it to be, and at Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems we are determined to do something very different about that.

That something is setting a goal set by only one other group of hospitals in the entire country – to eliminate errors in the most important areas of your care in our hospitals. We call this the Zero Defects Project, because we are not just aiming to make fewer errors in key areas; we are aiming to make zero errors.

When we think about errors in the care we give, we separate those errors into two buckets; the bucket of things we always want to do, and the bucket of things we never want to do. You would probably recognize some of the things in each bucket. For example, in the bucket of things we always want to do is giving aspirin to heart attack patients. When we don’t give aspirin to a heart attack patient who should have had it we have made an error in the bucket of things we always want to do. In the bucket of things we never want to do, for example, is leaving a sponge in a patient who had surgery.

There are about a million things in each of those buckets, but some errors are more important to you than others. An error that could seriously harm you, for example, is more important to eliminate than one that simply causes you inconvenience. Working with the physicians and nurses leaders in our hospitals, and using recommendations from national safety groups such as the Joint Commission and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, we identified what we at EMHS felt were the most important errors in those two buckets. It is those errors in particular that we are on the road to eliminate in our Zero Defect Project.

There are many reasons why it has been traditional in hospitals to aim for fewer errors in patient care but not set zero as the target. Perhaps most important of those reasons has been the belief that errors could not be eliminated. Well, maybe that is no longer true with some errors. We believe that if we aggressively pursue perfection, if we reduce the opportunities our doctors and nurses have to make mistakes, if we ‘hardwire’ the right care into how we do our work, if we have a staff absolutely driven to help each other not make mistakes in what we call a “Culture of Safety,” then we believe we should be able to get to zero defects in the key areas we have identified.

If we are wrong, and if we cannot get to zero, we will have at least gotten a lot closer to it than we would if our target was substantially less than zero. We will have done things trying to get to zero that we would not have been willing to try if our goal was 90%, for example.

At EMHS we do not just say we want to get to zero defects in the most important areas of care some day. We set a date by which we want to get to that target; September 30, 2012. We did so because we want to put ourselves ‘under the gun’ to get this done, and to make our goal one that we must actively work toward if we are to be successful. Tough goals without deadlines are too easy to put off. We will also be tracking our progress toward that goal, by reporting to our boards of directors – people like you charged as our board members with holding us accountable to the communities and people we serve – how many errors we make in each of those ‘buckets’ every three months.

The Zero Defect Project is our initiative to make our care for you as good as the care we want to give, and want to get for ourselves and our families. Join us as part of the team on this project, and we will get there together.