Leadership Message: Every Detail Matters in Quality and Safety

Dear Colleagues,

When it comes to the quality and safety of patient care, our work at UC Davis Health is never done.

Every day, across our hospital, clinics, classrooms, and laboratories, we are entrusted with the well-being of our patients and energized by the confidence of their families. That responsibility is constant. It does not lessen during times of transition, nor does it wait for perfect conditions. It calls on everyone in our health system to remain steady, focused, and fully engaged.

As you might know, we are currently in a transition in quality and safety leadership. Moments like this are important tests of our culture and discipline. UC Davis Health must continue delivering care at the highest levels while also improving our performance in key benchmark metrics.

To ensure continuity and momentum, I have established a small “tiger team” of experienced leaders who are helping keep our quality and safety priorities on track during this interim period as we prepare to recruit a new Quality and Safety Officer. The tiger team charge is simple: maintain progress, remove barriers, and support our teams in doing their best work.

Excellence is a daily choice

With your focused commitment and dedication, UC Davis Health will continue to deliver excellence daily. Our strength does not originate in a conference room; it begins at the bedside, in our clinics, in our operating rooms, in our labs, and in every interaction we have with patients and with each other.

It is built by the small, consistent actions that define professionalism: double-checking a medication, clarifying a handoff, documenting accurately, washing hands, asking a question when something does not look right.

Excellence is not a single achievement or an award on the wall. It is a daily choice. It is choosing to follow a protocol even when we are busy. It is choosing to speak up for safety even when it feels uncomfortable. It is choosing to support a teammate who needs help. Every day, we all ask each other to perform at the very best of our abilities while remaining compassionate, accountable, and collaborative.

Every detail in our care delivery matters because every patient matters.

Opportunities for improvement

I am really optimistic about enhancing our quality and safety operations even further.

Over the past several months, with the support of our Operational Excellence team and the engagement of colleagues across the School of Medicine, departments, and key operational units, we have conducted a comprehensive landscape assessment of our quality and safety programs. This work has examined our structures, workflows, reporting processes, and cultural strengths, as well as areas where we can improve.

While we await final findings, several themes are already clear. We have opportunities to better align responsibilities, close gaps in oversight, and make our processes more standardized, transparent, and explicit. In a complex academic health system such as ours, clarity is essential.

When roles are well defined and expectations are shared, we can reduce variation and strengthen reliability.

‘Summit’ and sharing

One promising opportunity is to reorganize some of our reporting and discussions into a more dynamic “summit” structure. Rather than simply reporting on metrics in isolated meetings, departments and units will come together to share challenges, analyze root causes, and exchange practical solutions and successes.

This approach emphasizes collective problem-solving and shared accountability. The UC Davis Health Quality Forum on March 12 also highlighted these concepts. We have seen the power of this model before. Over the past two years, “Access Summits” focused on improving access to care have produced meaningful results for our teams in ambulatory care.

By bringing teams together in a structured, solution-oriented format, we accelerated improvements and strengthened cross-functional collaboration. Now, we’ll apply similar principles in the quality and safety arena.

Alignment with the principles of high-reliability will be central to all of this work. High-reliability organizations (HROs) operate in complex, high-risk environments while maintaining consistently low rates of harm. They do so through preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience, and deference to expertise. We are studying approaches to implementing HRO principles more broadly here at UC Davis Health.

Reevaluation, transparency

Leadership transitions provide an opportunity to reevaluate and refresh. In quality and safety, introspection is healthy. We must continually examine how we work, what is working well, and what could work better. We must be candid and transparent about both our successes and our shortcomings. Transparency builds trust – internally and externally – and allows us to learn faster.

Even as roles evolve, our shared commitments remain constant. Our patients and their loved ones expect care that is safe, high-quality, compassionate, and as affordable as possible. These expectations are simple, but meeting them requires disciplined systems and caring people.

Meeting these expectations also requires technical excellence and human kindness. Kindness and inclusion matter deeply in our daily work. The way we treat one another influences the care we provide. Supporting colleagues, respecting diverse perspectives, and caring for our own well-being are foundational to sustaining excellence.

Room to improve

Whether we are performing a complex procedure or delivering a meal tray, we are part of a shared healing mission.

Thanks to your dedication, the stature of UC Davis Health continues to rise nationally and globally. Our recent recognition by Newsweek as one of the “World’s Best Hospitals 2026” reflects four key data points – strong quality metrics, peer recommendations, patient survey results, and outcomes data – and is testament to our excellent work so far.

At the same time, external benchmarks from CMS, Vizient, and clinical registries remind us that we still have work to do. Certain infections, including urinary tract infections, blood stream infections, and surgical site infections, as well as hospital-acquired conditions such as bleeding events and pressure injuries, require sustained focus.

We must be accountable for our data, understand trends in real time, and respond decisively. Dashboards are tools to promote action.

Trusted ally

Excellence in patient care is not a destination; it is a daily journey- a journey built on discipline. If you are currently involved in improvement efforts within your unit or team, thank you, and please continue that effort! Continue with energy, and continue with focus!

If you see an opportunity to improve, take initiative. Your teamwork strengthens outcomes. Your ideas drive innovation. Every checklist completed, every safe handoff, every safety concern raised contributes to safer, higher-quality care.

Our patients and their families trust UC Davis Health with what is most precious – their health, their hope, and their lives. Let’s honor that trust by staying focused, working diligently, supporting one another, and advancing quality and safety together, every single day.

Thank you for your commitment and your partnership.

Stay well,

Bruce Lee Hall, M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A., F.A.C.S.
Chief Clinical Officer