Mars Veterinary Health applies learnings from human healthcare to advance veterinary clinical excellence through collaboration with Johns Hopkins University

Pet health and wellbeing is at the center of Mars Veterinary Health’s global care network. In the spirit of continuous improvement and advancing clinical excellence, our global patient safety team conducted an extensive, two-year research project with leaders from the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety that examined voluntarily reported patient safety events (PSEs) from more than 2,000 primary care, specialty, and emergency veterinary facilities in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe.

Conducted with human healthcare support and guidance from Johns Hopkins University, the study published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association (JAVMA) and assesses differences in incident type, patient outcomes, and species between primary care and/or emergency practices from PSEs and uncovers trends and insights for patient safety and quality advancement in veterinary medicine.

“Due to the extensive range of data sets, we have identified common findings that can guide us in pinpointing areas of focus most likely to enhance quality improvement and patient outcomes,” said lead author Melinda Larson, DVM, DACVIM, Director of Medical Quality, BluePearl Pet Hospital. “This marks a significant advancement in patient safety reporting research, as our ability to analyze these events in veterinary medicine was previously restricted to a limited number of reports from individual clinics or small groups of facilities.”

As a leading global employer of veterinary professionals that believes our Purpose: A BETTER WORLD FOR PETS starts with the people who care for them, we have also studied the impact of PSEs on the mental health of veterinary professionals because we recognize the critical links to psychological safety and resilience in the workplace. We have long promoted a culture of safety among our veterinary teams, including encouraging PSE reporting as a critical component of high-quality care.

“Data-driven decisions are important to help us focus on patient safety in the right areas and develop evidence-based solutions,” said co-author Rochelle Low, DVM, MHL, MaS, Global Vice President of Quality and Patient Safety, Mars Veterinary Health. “Strong participation from so many clinics across nearly a dozen countries is an encouraging indicator that healthcare professionals worldwide recognize that improving patient outcomes requires that we normalize, encourage, and analyze patient safety reporting.”

Learning from Human Healthcare to Accelerate Improvements

Throughout the study, the authors noted several challenges due to the variations in reporting platforms, category options, and definitions, and proposed that the creation of a standardized patient safety taxonomy would improve data analytics across care settings. The retrospective analysis also indicates that much can be learned from reporting systems in human healthcare to accelerate learning in veterinary medicine, like how the Institute of Medicine’s landmark report “To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System” spurred the human healthcare patient safety movement.

Due to the volume of PSEs examined across thousands of veterinary facilities, it is believed to be one of the largest studies of its kind in veterinary medicine. Like the impactful patient safety work in human healthcare, this study warrants critical attention, and its findings have the potential to positively influence the veterinary profession’s approach to patient care.

Notable facts and findings include:

• Consistent with human healthcare, medication error is the largest category reported in veterinary medicine.
• As noted in To Err is Human, complexity and inherent risks of medicine and deficiencies at multiple levels of the healthcare systems are contributing factors to error, leading to a fundamental shift away from individual blame.
• A comprehensive, multistep approach is required to enhance the understanding of errors and their contributing factors and implementation of systems-based actions to prevent error recurrence.
• The use of voluntary reporting systems in veterinary medicine has been proposed to detect patterns, identify contributing factors, and facilitate the improvement of care systems to safeguard future patients.

With its extensive range of data sets, this study represents a substantial advancement in the field of patient safety in global veterinary medicine. We are grateful for the dedicated clinicians around the world who practice PSE reporting in their clinics—and particularly those in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United States who contributed to this important research.

Special acknowledgement is given to collaborators, including Drs. Albert Wu and Yea-Jen Hsu from Johns Hopkins University who enabled this study based on human healthcare learnings, along with authors across our global Mars Veterinary Health care network from AniCura, Banfield Pet Hospital, BluePearl Pet Hospital, Linnaeus, and VCA Animal Hospitals, including Melinda Larson, DVM, DACVIM; Rochelle Low, DVM, MaS, MHL; Lisen Schortz, PhD; Scott P. Shaw, DVM, DACVECC; Kathrine Blackie, BVetMed, MSc;  Kristi Grace, MS.

To explore additional peer-reviewed studies and learn more about how Mars Veterinary Health is helping to advance veterinary medicine through investments in science, research, and medical quality initiatives, please visit marsveterinary.com/veterinary-science.