Reducing Hospital Errors: Interventions that Build Safety Culture

Abstract

Hospital errors are a seemingly intractable problem and continuing threat to public health. Errors resist intervention because too often the interventions deployed fail to address the fundamental source of errors: weak organizational safety culture. This review applies and extends a theoretical model of safety culture that suggests it is a function of interrelated processes of enabling, enacting, and elaborating that can reduce hospital errors over time. In this model, enabling activities help shape perceptions of safety climate, which promotes enactment of safety culture. We then classify a broad array of interventions as enabling, enacting, or elaborating a culture of safety. Our analysis, which is intended to guide future attempts to both study and more effectively create and sustain a safety culture, emphasizes that isolated interventions are unlikely to reduce the underlying causes of hospital errors. Instead, reducing errors requires systemic interventions that address the interrelated processes of safety culture in a balanced manner.

Perception of nursing professionals on patient safety culture

“…However, the change of culture is not easy to be held, because it is a slow process, which develops itself into a long period of time (9) . The evaluation of the safety culture in an institution can be obtained through the perception of safety climate reported by its professionals (10) . Safety climate is defined as the measure of individual attitudes and perceptions of the characteristics of the safety culture among workers of the organization, which may vary within the institution (10) .…”

Implementing Healthcare Improvement

“…Utilising a range of processes that draw upon and strengthen different aspects of an organisation's culture might enable healthcare organisations to deliver more sustainable improvements in patient safety [78].…”

Patient Safety Issues: The Role of Organizational Behavioral Approach (Oba) in Addressing Issues Related to Medical Error and Safety Culture

“…The safety culture within the organization forms the individual's beliefs and behaviors because it transforms either positive or negative impacts based on the messages conveyed to the organization members (Cooper, 2002). Nowadays, the development of safety culture is the essential attempt to improve the quality of patient safety (Singer &Vogus, 2013). Consequently, the understanding of which approaches are effective as well as predicting the factors that may contribute to the effectiveness are very important to achieve the significant improvement later on (Gordon, Darbyshire, & Baker, 2012).…”