MOSES LAKE - Samaritan Hospital is the first hospital on the west coast to implement a new patient safety program to its Mother Baby Unit.

Managing Obstetrical Risk Efficiently (MOREOB) is a three year program developed by the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada. It's a patient safety program designed to give practitioners extensive training on how to respond to emergency situations and equips them with the most current recommendations available on responding to emergencies.

The program was provided to Samaritan by the Risk Management and Patient Safety Institute and Salus Global Corporation.

"MOREOB's guiding principle is patient safety," said Kimberly Sackman, co-chair of Samaritan's MOREOB program, during a presentation at Samaritan on Monday. "That's really the main goal, to keep our moms and our babies as safe as we possibly can in the hospital."

Anyone that provides care in the obstetrical unit is involved in the program, from aids and scrub techs to midwives and physicians, said Sackman.

"It's a very dynamic program and it changes from setting to setting," she said. "It's implemented in great big, huge hospitals that have level two and three and four obstetrical units all the way down to the smaller hospitals like this one."

"I felt that we needed to update some of our skills so that we were all on the same page," said Louise P. Olmsted, director of Samaritan's Mother Baby Unit.

She worked with the hospital's risk management department to present the program to the hospital's senior leadership, who approved it.

The first year of the program focuses on teaching core principles, said Olmsted, while the remaining two years reinforce the principles learned in the first year.

Training at Samaritan Hospital began in January 2011, she said.

MOREOB is modeled after programs that high reliability organizations - such as airlines, nuclear power plants and submarines - use to prevent catastrophic incidents. Through the MOREOB program, Samaritan has incorporated practices used by high reliability organizations, said Sackman.

Some of the important characteristics of high reliability organizations are that they make safety a priority and everyone's responsibility. They value communication and take anyone's input seriously, they operate as a team and they rehearse emergencies, she said.

"Emergencies are rehearsed on a regular basis, so that when something doesn't go right everyone knows what they're supposed to do, how they're supposed to do it, where they're supposed to go to get the stuff they need," she said.

Samaritan's obstetrical unit got to rehearse such a scenario in April during the unit launch, she said.

"They all got a chance to practice this drill, all together, and everybody now knows in that situation who's going to do what, when they're going to do it," she said. "Everyone's going to do it the same, it's not surprising anybody when somebody asks for a certain thing, because they've already anticipated that you're going to need it, because we've practiced it and will continue to do so."

The program also attempts to streamline communication within the unit.

"Our patient care records ideally are not divided by profession - we're working on that - so that you don't have a nurse charting on one piece of paper and a doctor charting on another piece of paper and those pieces of paper never cross paths. We really want everyone to be documenting things on the same piece of paper, or the same computer screen, so that the doctors can read what the nurses saw and the nurses can see what the doctor saw and we're all communicating better in that respect."

The obstetrical unit also gains access to a wealth of research literature through the MOREOB website.

"It's really neat to have the most current research, literature, big studies that are being done at our fingertips, literally," Sackman said. "It feels good to know that we're being innovative and it feels good to know that we're going to take the best care of our patients that we can."