Safety Culture
A strong safety culture, along with leadership commitment to zero harm and the widespread deployment of Robust Process Improvement (RPI) methods, are the essential components necessary for health care organizations to transform into high reliability organizations.
Safety Culture Project
The Safety Culture project aimed to optimize behaviors and practices resulting in an improved safety culture that reinforces and supports the prevention of patient harm. A safety culture enables trust, empowers staff to speak up about risks to patients, and to report errors and near misses, all of which drive improvement. It has been estimated that the average cost of a medical error is $11,366 resulting in approximately $17.1 billion in costs in 2008. Despite widespread attention to the importance of safety culture in performance improvement, many — if not most — health care organizations struggle to achieve it.
Project Team
Project Team
Barnes-Jewish Hospital, Missouri
Froedtert Hospital, Wisconsin
Kaiser Permanente, California
New York-Presbyterian Hospital, New York
OSF Saint Francis Medical Center, Illinois
VA Palo Alto Health Care System, California
Wake Forest Baptist Health, North Carolina
Safety Culture project results are scheduled for publication in 2018.
Project Outcomes
As with all of our quality initiatives, the project team will work to:
- Identify the root causes of failures to identify, report, and respond to adverse events and unsafe conditions.
- Find effective and targeted solutions for overcoming those failures.
- Test and validate solutions.
- Make lessons learned and solutions developed through the project widely available to all health care organizations.
The solutions developed as part of this project will ultimately reduce harm to patients and improve your organization’s ability to recognize and respond to unsafe conditions, and improve outcomes.
Additional Resources
The following additional resources are available for the Safety Culture project:
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Improvement Topics
- Hand Hygiene
- Hand-off Communications
- Hospital Acquired Pressure Injuries Prevention
- Preventing Avoidable Heart Failure Hospitalizations
- Preventing Falls
- Reducing C. Diff Infections
- Reducing Sepsis Mortality
- Safe and Effective Use of Insulin
- Safe Surgery
- Safety Culture
- Surgical Site Infections
- Venous Thromboembolism (VTE) Prevention