Our Impact


CPPA impact to date

  • Serving more than 300 sites
  • Encompassing more than 225,000 professionals
  • Teaching and presentations of more than 500 annually
  • Patient complaints of more than 4,165,968 coded
  • Coworker observations of more than 381,347 coded
  • Apparent patterns in PARS: 2,941 professionals identified
  • PARS response rate after intervention: 82 percent improvement
  • Apparent patterns in CORS: 1,578 professionals identified
  • CORS response rate after intervention: 87 percent improvement

Why is it important to address?

Patients under the care of disrespectful physicians are:

  • 20-30 percent more likely to have a surgical site infection
  • 20-40 percent more likely to develop sepsis
  • 24-30 percent more likely to die if trauma care is required

Physicians who model disrespect account for 50-70 percent of your organization's malpractice claims experience and cost.

Disrespectful team members create a ripple effect that impacts culture, performance and retention.

  • Increased withdrawal, anxiety, jousting
  • Decreased creativity, learning, motivation

CPPA goals are to maintain a never-ending focus and curiosity on how best to support individual professionals, professionals-in-training and their leaders in pursuit of quality, high reliability, safety and respect for patients, families and fellow team members.

Center personnel focus on:

  • Expanding our understanding of the impact of disrespect on team performance and outcomes.
  • Developing best practices for responding to in-the-moment slips in professionalism that occur in stressful work environments.
  • Creating programs designed to identify, share feedback and support individuals who model patterns of unprofessional behavior that may threaten team performance.
  • Equipping leaders with tools to address individuals who will not or cannot respond to awareness interventions and whose behavior and performance threaten outcomes.
  • Measuring the impact of CPPA programs whenever and wherever applied.

Vanderbilt Health Center for Patient and Professional Advocacy

2135 Blakemore Avenue | Nashville, TN 37212-3505 | Phone: 615-343-4500 (CPPA office) | Fax: 615-343-8580