Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Awards $2 Million to fund “The SafeCare@Home4Kids Learning Lab: Designing Safer Healthcare at Home for Children“
Congratulations to CYSHCNet researcher Carolyn Foster, MD, MS, Attending Physician at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, and Nicole Werner, PhD, Associate Professor at Indiana University Bloomington on their grant from AHRQ.
Their research will bring together experts in patient safety, human factors engineering, nursing, pediatrics, home healthcare, informatics, and lived family experience to design innovative, effective, and equitable approaches to prevent medication errors or device-related adverse events experienced by diverse children at home.
Together, this group will work to better understand how family caregivers and home nurses currently identify, communicate, and prevent healthcare safety errors and adverse events at home. Additionally, they will use input from families, home nurses, prescribing providers, and safety experts to co-design, implement, and evaluate a digital safety toolkit that addresses these healthcare safety events to improve patient safety at home. The project period is from September 30, 2023, to July 31, 2027.
SafeCare@Home4Kids represents a major shift in safety research toward focusing on the home as a fundamental healthcare practice setting for children and serving populations who may not otherwise be empowered or supported to address the safety of their children’s healthcare. “By combining health services research and human factors engineering with patient-family partnership, I believe we can meaningfully impact healthcare no matter where a child calls home,” said Dr. Foster, who is the principal investigator of the Foster Health Lab.