Jenny Slayton, MSN, RN, who has served as Vice President of Quality, Safety and Risk Prevention since 2016, is being promoted to Senior Vice President for Quality, Safety and Risk Prevention.
In this new position Slayton will serve as the Chief Quality, Safety and Risk Prevention Officer (QSRP) for Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) and all VUMC-related entities. She will report to C. Wright Pinson, MBA, MD, Deputy Chief Executive Officer and Chief Health System Officer for VUMC.
Slayton is charged with advancing VUMC’s safety and quality through greater alignment and collaborations spanning the institution with hospital operations, infection prevention, learning initiatives and the Vanderbilt Health Affiliated Network (VHAN). She will continue to provide leadership in the areas of conceptualization, development, implementation and measurement of the Medical Center’s approach to quality, patient safety and adverse event reduction.
“Jenny is an outstanding leader who is passionate about our organization and the quality and safety of the environment in which we care for our patients, as well as the well-being of our workforce. With her extensive experience involving our QSRP initiatives, she is ideally suited to lead across these areas of our enterprise that are vital to the Medical Center’s ongoing success,” Pinson said.
Slayton has served as a QSRP leader at VUMC since 2014, when she was named to the newly created role of executive director. As executive director she was responsible for the Vanderbilt Quality teams focused on quality improvement activities, accreditation and standards, education and dissemination of quality, and safety training and infection prevention. She was promoted to Vice President for QSRP in 2016.
As vice president, she has fulfilled a variety of roles within and outside of VUMC’s QSRP initiatives, including collaborating with health system executives to enhance the quality of care, as well as improving patient safety systems to support the Medical Center and Health System. She oversees multiple departments, including operational improvement teams, patient safety, accreditation and regulatory, medication safety, data analytics and abstraction, infection prevention and population health through daily operations as well as strategic planning for the system’s acute care hospitals and the ambulatory enterprise.
“I am truly honored for the opportunity to serve Vanderbilt in the role of Senior Vice President for QSRP. Over the course of my time at VUMC, I have been privileged to work with dedicated and skilled team members who have inspired and shaped my desire to continuously improve the quality of care we deliver to our patients and families,” Slayton said. “I look forward to continued collaboration across VUMC and all VUMC-related entities to strategize and operationalize improvement initiatives to address the increasing demands on our health care system and team members in providing safe, reliable care.”
Slayton joined VUMC and the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt in 1999 as a staff nurse in the Pediatric Emergency Department, where she served as a charge nurse as well. In 2005, she joined the Performance Management and Improvement team as a quality consultant for Patient Safety. A short time later she was tapped to lead the Performance Measurement and Improvement Department as administrative director, where her main focus involved directing the quality and safety programs in collaboration with senior leadership to ensure initiatives were aligned with organizational goals while assisting in the development of strategic quality and safety objectives.
She is the recipient of VUMC’s highest individual award, the Five Pillar Leader Award, and was honored by the Tennessee Hospital Association with its 2014 Patient Safety Leadership Award for “taking extraordinary and innovative steps to make patient safety and quality a top priority at the Medical Center.”
Slayton currently holds a Master of Science in Nursing from Vanderbilt and a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Middle Tennessee State University. She is completing a Doctor of Nursing Practice from Vanderbilt. She serves on and chairs multiple enterprise-wide committees within VUMC and on the Tennessee Hospital Association’s Quality Committee.
