Question

Safe Practice 2: Culture Measurement, Feedback, and Intervention

explain the meaning

Answer 1

Healthcare organizations must measure their culture, provide feedback to the leadership and staff, and undertake interventions that will reduce patients safety risk.

Objective: Ensure that organizations are measuring their patient safety culture, providing feedback to all levels of the organization, and, most importantly, undertaking interventions that generate improvements that reduce patient harm.

Rationale: Since achieving its own high-risk designation from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) a decade ago, healthcare has intensified its activities to measure safety culture and to develop interventions to improve it. There are no estimates on the frequency of medical errors or adverse events resulting from deficient or suboptimal safety culture, but it is known to be a contributing factor to their occurrences. The severity of harm resulting directly from the effects of poor safety culture is unknown and possibly immeasurable. However, history shows us that the consequences of poor safety culture can range from no harm (i.e., safe operations) to death. While many hospitals are actively using or implementing safety improvement strategies based on culture measurement, the effectiveness of such strategies has not been proven. The need persists for systematic quantitative and qualitative analyses of interventions to create a safe culture. Currently, there is no standard to estimate the cost of poor safety culture to a clinical unit, a hospital, or a hospital system. However, IOM firmly established that the safety culture of the U.S. healthcare system is deeply flawed and is the root cause of substandard care delivery.