Your safety is a shared responsibility.

Together we can ensure your visit is safe, and we value your active participation in your care and treatment. Please share your observations and insights, they are vital to our team and your care.

Our team members will:

  • Introduce themselves and always wear an identification badge.
  • Honor your privacy.
  • Clean their hands before working with you.
  • Ask and verify your name and date of birth on your identification band before medications, procedures and treatments.
  • Explain your care and treatment.
  • Ask you if you have any safety concerns and take steps to address them.

You and your family are encouraged to:

  • Check the information on your identification band for accuracy.
  • Wash your hands often and remind your family, visitors and health care team to do the same.
  • Ask questions, including AskMe3®.
  • Work with your health care team to plan your care.
  • Speak up if you have concerns.
  • Let us know if you have any allergies to foods or medicines or have ever had a bad reaction to any drug, food or latex product.

Preventing Falls

Falls can affect patients and families of all ages. With the proper precautions, you may lower your risk of injury due to a fall. We ask that you and your family:

  • Use your call button to ask for help.
  • Keep personal items close.
  • Always wear your eyeglasses or hearing aid.
  • Wear non-skid socks or shoes when walking.
  • Use a cane, crutches or a walker to help with balance.
  • Keep bed rails up and bed in a low position.
  • Sit before standing.
  • Keep the walking area clear of cords and clutter.
  • Leave on a light or nightlight.
  • Tell us if you see any spills or wet areas.

Going Home: SMART Discharge

In your Patient Guide, you’ll find a convenient checklist about your hospital discharge. We encourage you to review it with your health care team, ensuring that you understand discharge instructions.

Your Safety is a Shared Responsibility

It’s simple. We strive for zero events of preventable harm and exceptional care experiences for all those we serve. Our goals reflect our commitment to eastern North Carolina. It’s what we want for our neighbors, friends and family members, and for each of the 1.4 million people in the regional community we call home.

We value integrity.

We report quality results in simple terms. We report our data to external agencies like the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) so it can be shared nationally.

We value accountability.

We are accountable for the outcomes of the care we provide. We set big, audacious goals, and we measure our performance against those goals.

We value compassion.

Our work emphasizes how important it is to put the patient at the center of our care.

We value safety.

We use safety habits and error prevention tools to bolster the reliability of our clinical care processes.

We value education.

Quality experts work with frontline staff, leaders and physicians to share and impart rigorous methods to collect, measure and analyze safety and quality data. This process helps us understand the best ways to improve. Team members at our hospitals are working together to redefine how health care is delivered at the highest quality.

We value teamwork.

Leaders, physicians, frontline staff, patient and family advisors and patients work as teams to improve care. This collaboration assures care that is safe, timely, efficient, effective, equitable and patient-centered. And this teamwork engagement can impact how we care for patients for years to come.