 Hello everyone and thank you so much for joining. My name is Sarah Miller and I'm our Director of Partnerships here at the Patient Safety Movement Foundation and today we're very excited and honored to have the University of Vermont Medical Center team here with us to accept our virtual five star award. So before we get started I'd love to pass it over to Dave to introduce yourself. Thank you Sarah. It's an honor to be here today. These are some of the most important events we hold every year. So we'll get to the ceremony in a second but my name is Dave Mayer. I serve volunteer wise as the CEO for the Patient Safety Movement Foundation and for those that aren't aware of the Patient Safety Movement Foundation a little background is we were founded in 2012 by a visionary Joe Chiani who really believed that achieving zero preventable harm could be done if we all put an urgency and an effort towards it and under Joe's leadership the organization has really become a global organization now. We're in 54 countries over 4800 hospitals that we work in collaboration and partnership with. Trying to achieve that goal of zero preventable harm by 2030 we call it the patient safety moonshot. Let's get to zero by the end of this decade but I'm delighted to be here with the UVM leadership team in honoring that fine health system for the remarkable work they've done. They started back in 2013 made their first commitment. They've now made over 25 commitments including the culture of safety survey and commitment to achieve the highest quality culture across their system and that was in 2017 and thus really delivered on what we look for in a five-star health system. So it is my honor to present the five-star hospital award to the UVM leadership team and congratulate them for outstanding work the amount of lives they have saved over the last 10-12 years. Thanks Dave and UVM we'd love to kind of get some background on each of you and give some background about why you were passionate about achieving this award and any great initiatives that you're currently working on. Thank you Sarah. My name is Dr. Steve Leffler. I'm the president and chief operating officer of the UVM Medical Center. I'm an emergency physician by training and so I just want to say that at the UVM Medical Center keeping our patients safe is the foundation for everything that we do every day. It's also one of the most difficult and complex aspects of our work because it involves every single one of us in so many different ways. Patient safety is truly everyone's responsibility at the Medical Center whether our job is clinical in nature or not. Our patient safety team led by Lori Notowitz does an incredible job leading us in this work, providing us with guidance and a framework for the advancement of the very many patient safety initiatives that we undertake consistently around the clock throughout the year. Last week we observed patient safety awareness week with a great engagement from so many of our staff. This week I'm so proud joining my colleagues and accepting the award from the Patient Safety Movement Foundation and reaffirm our shared commitment to patient safety. Dr. Patrick Bender will talk more about our specific efforts to reduce preventable harm and constantly improve patient safety. But I also wanted to start by thanking all of our employees for all they do every single day to help us deliver patient care, safe patient care to every patient that we serve. From the bedside on our inpatient floors to our operating rooms, our clinics and our community vaccination site, every person at this organization has a role to play in this critically important work. I also want to thank the Patient Safety Movement Foundation for advocacy on behalf of people all over the United States and across the world. Those are our patients now or who may become patients in the future. Your work helps support hospitals like ours and our constant effort to improve and we're so proud to partner with you. With that I'll turn it over to Dr. Bender and Lori to talk about some of the initiatives that we're undertaking. Thank you. Hi everybody, my name is Patrick Bender. I'm an anesthesiologist by training and I'm the Vice President for Quality here at the Medical Center. I just want to take a minute to talk about our culture of patient safety here at the Medical Center. We are really committed to implementing best practices that are known to reduce patient harm. Something as simple as the checklist that we use and the care bundles that we use to help prevent catheter associated bloodstream infections are really impactful and we do a good job of implementing as many of those as possible. And I think the results that we've seen here have shown that that commitment is paying off to keep our patients safe. The other thing I'd like to mention is our staff at every level of the organization are real patient safety advocates. We have a very strong culture of patient safety advocacy and every single one of our staff members is empowered to alert us to any potential patient safety situations that they see and because of their strong advocacy we're able to understand when there is a threat to patient safety before it actually reaches the patient and we're able to make you know the changes necessary in our system to prevent that from actually occurring and any harm reaching the patient. So it really is attributable to everybody in this organization that maintains our strong culture of safety. And even especially through the last year where so many places around the country in the world that's really struggled with patient safety and the stress of COVID we've been able to weather that storm relatively successfully and I think it's because of that strong culture that we have throughout. So really this award is attributable to each and every person that works here and I can't thank them enough. So and thank you to the Foundation for presenting this award to us. And I'm going to hand it over to our Director of Patient Safety, Gloria Noto. Thank you Patrick. Thank you Steve. Thank you to the Patient Safety Movement Foundation. We we are so honored to receive this award. It's been a pleasure working with you since 2013 to improve patient safety across the United States and across our organization through the use of your apps. I would like to just say thank you also to our leadership team because without the leadership team we would not be able to implement the safety initiatives that we that we would like and we have the support of the safety of the leadership team. And also I would like to say thank you to the wonderful Patient Safety Department team. An amazing group of dedicated professionals passionate about patient safety who do this work every day along with all of the doctors and the nurses and the technicians and the food service workers and the environmental service workers and everybody who works in this organization. Patient safety is truly embedded into the culture. So thank you so much for this award. It's it's a great honor. Thank you. I was just going to add just a couple things and then you could close us out. But thanks to all of you. Your words and your messages are inspiring. University of Vermont Medical Center is truly a role model for others across the country. You embrace safety and you've shown it can save lives and make a big difference. So again my congratulations. We're delighted to continue to partner with you and achieve our mission of zero preventable harm. So again thank you and keep up the great work. Great and to echo Dave's comments we can't thank you enough. So we were so excited to welcome you into our network as a five star hospital and again we look forward to continuing all this great work with you guys. Thank you. Thank you.