A new face and a new role in Risk Management

Now under the leadership of Executive Director of Patient Safety, Quality, Risk, Infection Control, CDI and Clinical Compliance Christi Clark Barney, MSN, RN, the Department of Risk Management at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital has been restructured for improved efficiency and increased collaboration with the Department of Patient Safety. The department also recently welcomed Senior Risk Manager E. Tucker O’Day, MSPT, MS, HEM, and promoted Maddie Walsh to Risk Management Associate.

The Departments of Risk Management and Patient Safety have always worked together. Under the new structure, they are able to further collaborate. Risk Management is now using RL Solutions, BWFH’s safety reporting system, to track and trend risk management data points for external and internal reporting. They are also focused on finetuning the Collaborative Case Review process to better utilize information learned from Collaborative Case Reviews to help make the findings more actionable and to better manage the risk of similar events occurring in the future.

In her new role as Senior Risk Manager, O’Day is charged with identifying risks and responding to them in order to reduce liability and promote both staff and patient safety. O’Day comes to BWFH from A.I.M. Mutual Insurance Companies where she served as Specialist in Healthcare and Human Services for the last three years. Prior to that, she worked for Partners HealthCare as Program Manager for Ergonomics in Occupational Health Services for 11 years. In that role, she traveled among all the Partners HealthCare institutions, including BWFH, promoting workplace safety.

She now looks forward to making BWFH her home and working closely with the Department of Patient Safety. “I hope to continue and expand upon the great work that Joanne Locke and Maureen Fischer have put in place and look forward to meeting new colleagues and re-connecting with staff I have worked with in the past. In direct care areas, I feel that there is a great deal of overlap between employee safety and patient safety,” she says. “I like to look at the environment as a whole. It should be safe for everyone.”

Maddie Walsh began her career at BWFH as Administrative Project Coordinator for Risk Management, Clinical Compliance and Credentialing in 2014 and was recently promoted to Risk Management Associate.

In her new role, Walsh will continue to be involved in hospital-wide projects, but with a focus on external reporting. She now acts as a liaison to the Department of Public Health, the Board of Registration in Medicine, the Medical Product Safety Network and CRICO. 

Walsh will also continue to act as the hospital’s Project Manager for the Collaborative Just Culture of Safety Program. “I’ve been managing the program since we first launched the initiative in 2014,” she says. “Over the years it’s been great to see a positive change in the safety culture of BWFH and to feel as though the Department of Risk Management has been a driving force. In my previous role, I had the pleasure of shadowing Joanne Locke and Maureen Fischer who were such great mentors. It wasn’t until their retirement that I realized how much I learned from the two of them, and how well they prepared me to take on this new role. So far it’s been filled with a tremendous amount of learning opportunities, but I’m excited to see what comes next and to have Tucker join our team!”