Alberty, Dunbar combine legal, clinical and operational experience to keep patients safe at Bailey Medical Center

Corrie Alberty, BSN, RN has been the risk manager at Bailey Medical Center for the past five years. She started at Bailey in the post-anesthesia care unit (PACU), after working in adult ICUs at two downtown Tulsa hospitals. Cole Dunbar graduates with his master’s degree in health care administration in May of 2023. He has been working at Bailey as operational specialist and security director for about two years.

While Alberty and Dunbar have different responsibilities at the hospital, they share the same goal: patient safety.

“I review all patient safety events. We investigate each one to see what our liability is or could be, and how to also prevent that from happening again,” said Alberty. “We look at if there was any harm, what kind of harm and how to prevent any harm in the future.”

Alberty uses her experience in a law office and as a nurse to guide her work in risk management.

“Risk management fit me because I worked in a legal office before I went to nursing school,” said Alberty. “Risk management kind of marries those two areas together, so I get to work in both the legal side and the clinical side. It’s fascinating and I really enjoy it.”

Dunbar has no clinical experience but finds he can still affect patients’ outcomes through his operational work.

“Physical environment is important too. If the building is not safe, if the medical equipment isn’t safe, none of it works. You can’t have clinical safety without physical safety too,” said Dunbar.

He also serves as security director, which he says plays a vital part in maintaining a safe environment where clinicians can provide care to patients.

“I find it interesting that non-clinical things like environment and security will affect the clinical pieces so much. I can work with people like Corrie who have clinical expertise and get the perfect situation for each patient to have great outcomes,” said Dunbar. “I find it really interesting and it’s something different every day. You never know what to expect.”

Bailey Medical Center runs a Great Catch program, where staff members are rewarded for catching mistakes, inconsistencies or issues before any adverse events occur.

“We’re very big on empowering our employees from every level to report safety events. We want everyone reporting without fear of retaliation; we just want to hear about it,” said Alberty. “We don’t want to point fingers; we just want to know that it happened and how to fix the process.”

Alberty says if she and the risk management team do their job correctly, most patients will never even be aware of them.

“For me, patient safety is not causing harm to the patient while they’re in our facility. I think our work centers around what doesn’t happen to the patient when they’re here,” said Alberty. “It’s kind of unglorified because hopefully, they’ll never know any risk of anything.”

Dunbar added that small mistakes in a clinical setting are often magnified and can cause great harm to the patient.

“Patient safety is making sure we don’t cause harm to the patient and provide the best outcomes possible. Unfortunately, there are a lot of things that can go wrong, but a lot of times they won’t experience that, which is wonderful,” said Dunbar. “Because one little mess up can change someone’s life forever.”