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Read the press release announcing the 5 Million Lives Campaign.

Overview of the 5 Million Lives Campaign

Do No Harm.  It is a fundamental principle for health care providers: primum non nocere – first, do no harm.  It is our duty, our responsibility.  Patients ask and assume that the health care that intends to help them should, at the very least, not injure them.

Despite the extraordinary hard work and best intentions of caregivers, thousands of patients are harmed in US hospitals every day.  Hospital-acquired infections, adverse drug events, surgical errors, pressure sores, and other complications are commonplace.

Based on data collected over several years from multiple partner institutions, IHI estimates that nearly 15 million instances of medical harm occur in the US each year – a rate of over 40,000 per day.  This is a burden larger than most patients and professionals, and even some health care researchers, realize.

It is time to declare this toll unacceptable; time to end it.  You can help.

An Impressive Start

When IHI and its partner organizations came together to launch the 100,000 Lives Campaign, a national effort to reduce preventable deaths in US hospitals, no one could have imagined the strength of the response. What happened was truly exhilarating: an extraordinary resurgence of spirit and an unprecedented commitment to change and collaboration across the health care industry.

The 3,100 hospitals that participated in this initiative achieved a remarkable goal. Through their work on the Campaign’s interventions, combined with other national and local improvement efforts, these facilities saved an estimated 122,000 lives in 18 months. Along the way, nothing less than new standards of care began to emerge.  Health care will never be the same – and the work continues.

An Expanded Focus

Avoidable deaths are the most extreme consequence of defects in health care, but harm is another important foe – and one that tragically affects many more lives.  Many harm events have lasting effects on the lives of patients and their loved ones.

For this reason, IHI and its partner organizations are going to tackle medically-induced injuries in health care.  We will expand our focus in a new campaign designed to dramatically accelerate efforts to reduce non-fatal harm, while continuing to fight needless deaths.

There are many other patient safety initiatives underway that align with these objectives.  As IHI launches this next Campaign, we intend to coordinate and collaborate with these other superb efforts to amplify all programs and achieve unprecedented national results.

Five Million Lives

IHI believes the time is right to establish another bold objective – a seemingly impossible goal – for US health care:

Protect patients from five million incidents of medical harm over the next two years (December 2006 – December 2008)

To achieve this, we aim to enlist at least 4,000 US hospitals in a renewed national commitment to improve patient safety faster than ever before. 

Proven Interventions

The 5 Million Lives Campaign challenges American hospitals to adopt 12 changes in care that save lives and reduce patient injuries:

The six interventions from the 100,000 Lives Campaign

• Deploy Rapid Response Teams…at the first sign of patient decline
  
  
• Deliver Reliable, Evidence-Based Care for Acute Myocardial Infarction…to prevent deaths from heart attack 
  
  
• Prevent Adverse Drug Events (ADEs)…by implementing medication reconciliation
  
  
• Prevent Central Line Infections…by implementing a series of interdependent, scientifically grounded steps
  
  
• Prevent Surgical Site Infections…by reliably delivering the correct perioperative antibiotics at the proper time
  
  
• Prevent Ventilator-Associated Pneumonia…by implementing a series of interdependent, scientifically grounded steps

New interventions targeted at harm

• Prevent Harm from High-Alert Medications... starting with a focus on anticoagulants, sedatives, narcotics, and insulin
  
  
• Reduce Surgical Complications... by reliably implementing all of the changes in care recommended by SCIP, the Surgical Care Improvement Project (www.medqic.org/scip)
  
  
• Prevent Pressure Ulcers... by reliably using science-based guidelines for their prevention
  
  
• Reduce Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection…by reliably implementing scientifically proven infection control practices
  
  
• Deliver Reliable, Evidence-Based Care for Congestive Heart Failure... to avoid readmissions
  
  
• Get Boards on Board … by defining and spreading the best-known leveraged processes for hospital Boards of Directors, so that they can become far more effective in accelerating organizational progress toward safe care

For more information about the Campaign interventions, including How-to Guides for each, see the Materials area of IHI.org at http://www.ihi.org/IHI/Programs/Campaign/Campaign.htm?TabId=2.

IHI also encourages all participants to add their own changes in care to reduce mortality and other forms of harm. As successes grow, we will expand the list of interventions supported by the Campaign.  For example, as soon as possible we hope to introduce best practices for prevention of other hospital-acquired infections such as Clostridium difficile (C. diff).

An Ambitious Agenda

The 5 Million Lives Campaign will be the largest improvement initiative undertaken in recent history by the health care industry. The changes are bold and the goals are enormous.

But, based on the success of the 100,000 Lives Campaign, IHI and our partner organizations are confident that the collective spirit of the people and institutions in the US health care system will rise to this challenge.

Our patients expect – and they surely deserve – nothing less.

Get Involved

We invite your organization to become an active participant in this historic Campaign.  There is no cost to joining, but it does involve obligations.  Your organization needs to be ready to make changes at a faster pace, to share ideas with others, and to report back on your progress.

In concert with our partners, IHI will provide detailed information about each intervention, and we will make powerful implementation tools and supporting expertise widely available and easily accessible throughout the Campaign.

Some is not a number.  Soon is not a time.

The number is five million.  The time to start is now.

What Is “Harm”? The 5 Million Lives Campaign defines “medical harm” as: Unintended physical injury resulting from or contributed to by medical care (including the absence of indicated medical treatment), that requires additional monitoring, treatment or hospitalization, or that results in death. Such injury is considered harm whether or not it is considered preventable, resulted from a medical error, or occurred within a hospital. For more information on how the Campaign defines medical harm see the FAQs tab in the Campaign area of IHI.org at http://www.ihi.org/IHI/Programs/Campaign/Campaign.htm?TabId=6.

Read an overview of the 100,000 Lives Campaign