Northern Arizona Healthcare Wins National Patient Safety Award

Transforming safety culture earns Northern Arizona Healthcare ECRI's 2025 Safety Excellence Award

WILLOW GROVE, Pa., Nov. 12, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- ECRI, a global healthcare safety nonprofit organization, named Northern Arizona Healthcare the winner of the 2025 Safety Excellence Award, recognizing the organization's comprehensive, systemwide approach to advancing a culture of safety, accountability, and transparency.

Northern Arizona Healthcare (NAH) implemented a wide range of initiatives to strengthen its safety culture, uniting leadership and frontline staff through shared learning, open communication, and consistently reinforcing safety priorities.

The annual Safety Excellence Award from ECRI and the ISMP Patient Safety Organization (PSO) honors outstanding patient safety initiatives and evidence-based strategies that improve safety-related outcomes.

"We are pleased to receive this recognition of the work each of our colleagues puts in daily to ensure patient safety and quality of care is always our top priority," said NAH CEO Dave Cheney. "We know we only receive this kind of recognition when our teams are working well together and prioritizing the patient at every step, which means we do our best when that's our culture. It's rewarding to see validation of our hard work."

Soliciting Input then Taking Action

NAH's journey to safety excellence is anchored in leadership visibility and staff empowerment. The organization introduced monthly open forums that invite any team member to speak directly with the CEO and patient safety leaders about challenges, risks, and improvement ideas. Action plans developed from those discussions are posted on the employee portal for all staff to access, creating a feedback loop that drives continuous improvement.

Daily safety briefings were redesigned to identify barriers in real time and encourage proactive problem-solving across staff units. Leadership, quality, and safety teams now convene at the bedside, gathering feedback from patients and their families and sharing insights with the rest of the care team immediately.

Implementing "Just Culture" Principles

To reinforce accountability and promote shared learning, NAH revamped its "just culture" training and incorporated concepts from Extreme Ownership, a leadership framework developed by Navy SEALs that emphasizes personal responsibility and team cohesion.

Embracing System-Level Improvements

NAH also employed Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) to uncover system-level opportunities for improvement. From there, they implemented numerous strategies including adopting a mobile app to facilitate accurate pediatric weight-based medication dosing in emergency settings, investing in emergency department stretchers with bed alarms, scales, and call-light capabilities, and implementing a standardized process for handling and transporting nuclear medicine materials.

Advancing Safe Medication Practices

NAH committed to continually improve safe medication use through the rigorous analysis of error reports and near-miss incidents. They implemented several best practices from ISMP – the gold standard in mediation safety – including adopting IV fluid shortage management strategies in the wake of Hurricane Helene, standardizing vaccine storage to reduce the risk of administration errors, and deploying new IV pump technology to ensure interoperability.

"ECRI is proud to celebrate NAH's achievements," said ECRI President and CEO Marcus Schabacker, MD, PhD. "They embraced system design, standardization, and a proactive approach to preventing harm. By engaging every colleague, from executives to bedside caregivers, they're fostering a culture rooted in trust and accountability and driving meaningful cultural transformation. A strong safety culture alone isn't enough to improve safety long-term. But culture combined with system improvements, like those NAH implemented, creates sustainable change. That approach can position healthcare facilities to break the cycle of adverse events, burnt out staff, and siloed troubleshooting."

Award Honorable Mentions

Two additional ECRI partners received an Honorable Mention for the Safety Excellence Award:

• HealthPartners in Bloomington, MN was honored for training its team of foreign language interpreters as patient safety advocates through didactic instruction and clinical simulation, enabling interpreters to identify and escalate safety concerns.
  
  
• BayCare HomeCare in Largo, FL was honored for fostering an environment where safety event reporting was embraced as a proactive, valuable, non-punitive tool to improve patient safety.

Northern Arizona Healthcare won Honorable Mention for the Safety Excellence Award in 2023. They will be recognized as the 2025 winner during the ECRI and the ISMP PSO Annual Meeting on November 12, 2025. Learn more about the safety excellence award.

About ECRI and the ISMP Patient Safety Organization (PSO)

ECRI is an independent, nonprofit organization improving the safety, quality, and cost-effectiveness of care across all healthcare settings. ECRI is the only organization worldwide to conduct independent medical device evaluations, with labs located in North America and Asia Pacific. ECRI is designated an Evidence-based Practice Center by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and a federally certified Patient Safety Organization (PSO) by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The ECRI and ISMP PSO maintains the largest national patient safety reporting and learning system—collecting and analyzing more than eight million patient safety events across 90 percent of the United States.

About Northern Arizona Healthcare

Northern Arizona Healthcare is the largest health care organization in a region that encompasses more than 50,000 square miles. As a nonprofit health care system, our organization is governed by a volunteer board of directors. Our team of more than 4,000 doctors, nurses and other experts works together to keep you and your family healthy.

Serving more than 700,000 people in communities across the region, we provide comprehensive health care services through two hospitals – Flagstaff Medical Center and Verde Valley Medical Center – as well as through primary care and specialty physician clinics, outpatient surgical centers, Cardiovascular Institute, Cancer Centers of Northern Arizona Healthcare, EntireCare Rehab & Sports Medicine, Children's Health Center, Orthopedic & Spine Institute, Guardian Air and Guardian Medical Transport.

For more information on NAH programs and services, visit NAHealth.com. "Like" NAH on Facebook by searching Northern Arizona Healthcare Flagstaff and Northern Arizona Healthcare Verde Valley. Follow NAH on Instagram by searching Northern Arizona Healthcare.

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SOURCE ECRI