Safety Culture

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.  

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.

The following additional resources are available for the Safety Culture project:

• Safety Culture Fact Sheet