San Antonio (July 10, 2007) – Quality and safety mandates in health care that determine federal payments to hospitals … changing the culture of health care away from punishment toward reporting and amending of safety issues … magnet status for hospitals relating to nursing care and the possible connection to improved patient outcomes.
These are just three of the topics to be discussed by a national slate of speakers July 12-14 at the Sixth Annual Summer Institute on Evidence-Based Practice at the Crowne Plaza Riverwalk Hotel, 111 E. Pecan St. in San Antonio.
The lecturers will include Dennis O’Leary, M.D., president of The Joint Commission, which sets national standards of hospital accreditation; Kevin Johnson, M.D., of Vanderbilt Medical Center and Kathleen Stevens, Ed.D, R.N., of The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, members of the Institute of Medicine expert panel on preventing medication errors; Judy Smetzer, R.N., B.S.N., M.S.N., vice president of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices; and Jeremy Grimshaw, Ph.D., of the University of Ottawa.
Francisco G. Cigarroa, M.D., president of The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, will deliver welcoming remarks the morning of July 13.
“We expect more than 400 health care providers and quality managers to attend,” said Dr. Stevens, director of the Academic Center for Evidence-Based Practice (ACE) in the School of Nursing at the U.T. Health Science Center. The ACE, established in 2000, is dedicated to bridging research into practice. This is accomplished through collaboration with the South Texas Veterans Health Care System’s VERDICT Center of Excellence and with national and international entities such as the Cochrane Collaboration and the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
The U.S. and Canadian directors of the Cochrane Collaboration will be at the conference.
A brochure is available in PDF at www.acestar.uthscsa.edu/institute/su07/index.html. Conference lectureships are provided by the South Texas Veterans Health Care System, the Methodist Healthcare System and the Academic Center for Evidence-Based Practice. The ACE is the conference sponsor.
The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio is the leading research institution in South Texas and one of the major health sciences universities in the world. With an operating budget of $536 million, the Health Science Center is the chief catalyst for the $14.3 billion biosciences and health care sector in San Antonio’s economy. The Health Science Center has had an estimated $35 billion impact on the region since inception and has expanded to six campuses in San Antonio, Laredo, Harlingen and Edinburg. More than 22,000 graduates (physicians, dentists, nurses, scientists and allied health professionals) serve in their fields, including many in Texas. Health Science Center faculty are international leaders in cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, aging, stroke prevention, kidney disease, orthopaedics, research imaging, transplant surgery, psychiatry and clinical neurosciences, pain management, genetics, nursing, allied health, dentistry and many other fields.