Patient Safety and Quality

Keeping our patients and their families safe and healthy are top priorities for UPMC Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. It is our goal to deliver the safest, most efficient care through outstanding building design and state-of-the-art technology.  Additionally, we at Children’s have made a commitment to provide high quality care in order to make a patient’s stay as pleasant as possible. 

From enhancements such as separate garages and elevators for patients to more subtle improvements including pass through nurse servers between corridors and patient rooms to restock supplies or dispose of dirty linens and dietary trays, our new hospital is designed to positively impact infection rates, patient privacy, and noise levels.  Other quality advances include the following:

• The private and semi-private patient rooms enhance high-quality care by lowering infection rates and noise levels while increasing patient privacy. The design was perfected by taking caregivers and families through several rounds of room mock-ups (design, building, redesign, rebuild) in order to get spatial dimensions correct and provide proper room for equipment, care giving and family living.
• Nearly half of the operating rooms in the new hospital are designed to accommodate minimally invasive procedures.
• The location of all operative services on one floor including operating suites, a catheterization lab, interventional radiology, a procedures center, and an infusion center.
• Our catheterization lab is designed to mimic the operating room environment.  Should a more invasive procedure be required, the patient does not have to move to a different location.
• Specialized units, such as cardiac intensive care and oncology, are located proximate to labs and other services often utilized by these specialties.
• An on-site linear accelerator and PET/CT scanner eliminate the need for patients to travel to other buildings for these services.
• Computerized room-level observation stations, a decentralized medication dispensing process, and decentralized nurses stations allow caregivers to closely monitor patients and improve communications with parents.
• Heart and brain activity are monitored locally and remotely to enable caregivers to monitor patients closely.
• Floors feature standardized locations of patient supplies and the supply rooms are par leveled in order to decrease the time spent by caregivers locating supplies.
• Intensive care rooms are designed uniformly to enhance consistency and are individually equipped with all necessary supplies, specialized water lines and respiratory gases.
• An integrated life support system connects physiological monitoring and the nurse call system to wireless phones, keeping caregivers in constant contact with our patients and their current conditions. 
• Isolated rooms and playrooms ensure containment of contagious disease.

We acknowledge that safety and security go hand-in-hand when it comes to a hospital visit.  For this reason, we’ve implemented a variety of security measures to make our campus safer for our patients and their guests. These include:

• The development of a campus-wide patient location system.
• A campus design that includes a high degree of secured access areas, separation of public areas and staff-restricted access areas, and restricted use elevators.

Read more about the Safest Children’s Hospital (PDF).