Florida Letter of Commitment

Dear ECRI Grant Team,

We are pleased to support ECRI in its application for funding to bring the Foundations of Medication Safety for Nursing Homes Programs to our state through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Civil Money Penalty Fund grant program. Foundations provides standardized, accessible, and evidence-based education for staff to understand why medication errors occur, how to identify risks, and how to apply effective prevention strategies.

The overall goal of this project is to improve medication safety throughout the organization. A key component of this effort is to enhance understanding among both leadership and frontline staff as to why medication errors occur. Recognizing that errors are multifactorial—resulting from both active failures by frontline staff and latent failures embedded within organizational systems—will help strengthen quality assurance performance improvement and continuous quality improvement programs by improving the quality of root cause analyses and medication-error investigations.

Additionally, the project aims to deepen awareness of the critical role that organizational culture plays in medication safety, acknowledging that a supportive and transparent environment is essential for sustained improvement. Another important goal is to increase knowledge regarding effective risk reduction strategies, ensuring that both leaders and staff use appropriate strategies to prevent errors and reduce harm to residents.

Disclaimer: Our nursing home understands that CMS requires grantees (ECRI) a funding limit maximum of $5,000 per nursing home for the category of "training" and that CMS will track participation in the grant project via our National Provider Identifier, and we acknowledge the proposed project funding will count against our allocated budget for this project category.