Safe Practices Implementation Challenge Grants

The summary for the Safe Practices Implementation Challenge Grants grant is detailed below. This summary states who is eligible for the grant, how much grant money will be awarded, current and past deadlines, Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) numbers, and a sampling of similar government grants. Verify the accuracy of the data FederalGrants.com provides by visiting the webpage noted in the Link to Full Announcement section or by contacting the appropriate person listed as the Grant Announcement Contact. If any section is incomplete, please visit the website for the National Institutes of Health, which is the U.S. government agency offering this grant.

Safe Practices Implementation Challenge Grants: The Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has established the Patient Safety Task Force (PSTF) with the mission to coordinate research and analysis efforts across the Department, and to collaborate on reducing the occurrence of injuries that result from medical error. The PSTF brings together the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to integrate and coordinate their activities related to patient safety and the reduction of medical errors. AHRQ and PSTF announce the availability of funds to assist health care institutions to: (1) assess risks and known hazards to patients in the process of care leading to preventable injuries or harm, and devise intervention strategies; and (2) implement safe practices that show evidence of eliminating or reducing the known risks and hazard associated with the process of care. A cost sharing of a minimum of 50 percent of total costs is a condition of award for all recipients of funding from this solicitation. Cost sharing refers to a situation where the recipient shares in the costs of the project. Cost sharing is a requirement for funding because projects funded under this solicitation will have a greater likelihood of success if the recipient contributes to the costs of the project. Eligible institutions must demonstrate evidence of commitment to reducing the potential for harm from preventable medical error and improving patient safety through the identification of risks and hazards and eliminating them by implementing safe practices. Two type of projects are requested in the RFA with approximately half the total number of awards being funded in each category. Risk assessment and intervention planning projects are intended for organizations that are in process of identifying risk areas. These planning projects are for those identified areas that represent a significant threat to patient safety for which further assessments are needed to identify the specific target risks and hazards with the risk area to be eliminated or reduced and to make the process of care safer. The use of established assessment and analytic approaches, including root cause analysis, process mapping, failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), and probabilistic risk assessment (PRA), are strongly suggested. Once specific target risks are identified, then intervention strategies for the target risks can be designed. These risk assessment planning grants will be no more than 12 months in duration. Patient Safety Implementation projects - Organizations and provider networks wishing to introduce safe practices, to minimize or eliminate the potential for risks of injury or harm to patients from the process of care, may submit a second type of application for implementation project. The determination of the safe practice may be from published recommendation of safe practices such as ARHQ's Evidence Report/Technology Assessment Number 43, Making Health Care Safer: A Critical Analysis of Patient Safety Practices (See ref.1); the National Quality Forum's (NQF) Safe Practices for Better Health Care (See ref.2); and Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) (See ref.3) six patient safety priorities. Safe practices may be derived from ongoing research findings from patient safety grants and projects funded by AHRQ and/or other funding agencies. Organizations are expected to identify the target risk that is to be addressed by the safe practice, develop a complete implementation plan for introducing the safe practice intervention, and provide an evaluation plan to determine whether the safe practice did, indeed, eliminate the target risk, was the practice adopted by health care professions within the organization and what was the impact of the practice on the process of care. The implementation projects can be up to 24 months in duration. Currently funded AHRQ safety improvement projects that are poised to build upon and expand initial results to additional settings or populations are also eligible to apply under this RFA.. All implementation projects are expected to identify anticipated outcomes prospectively. AHRQ seeks to support projects that can be generalized to other settings for use by those who wish to assess risks and devise intervention strategies, or adopt safe practices to eliminate or minimize the risk of harm to patients from the process of care. These cooperative agreements are intended to capitalize on advances in knowledge about medical errors and translate established strategies to reduce medical errors into the adoption of proven safe practices.