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In This Issue:
When BWH launched its first full Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Patient Safety Culture Survey in Oct. 2012, more than 70 percent of BWHers whose work directly involves patient care responded with their honest feedback about BWH’s culture of patient safety. This included physicians, pharmacists, nurses, patient care assistants, patient transporters, house staff and many others.
Since then, their thoughtful responses have helped BWH focus on improving communication openness and non-punitive response to error. For example, through its Safety Matters publication, BWH shares stories about past medical errors and how the hospital is preventing these errors from happening in the future. Additionally, BWH has initiated Just Culture training for senior leadership and managers in how to respond to human errors so that staff will feel more comfortable speaking about them. The next step will involve Just Culture training for staff.
This fall, employees whose work directly impacts patient care again have an opportunity to provide their feedback about BWH’s culture of patient safety by taking the 2014 BWH Patient Safety Culture Survey, which launched Monday, Oct. 20.
“By completing the survey, you will help make BWH the safest possible place not only for our current patients and staff, but also for the next generation of health care professionals and patients who come through the doors of the Brigham,” said BWH President Betsy Nabel, MD. “I urge you to take a few minutes to share your valuable perspectives.”
Staff involved in direct patient care should have received an email this week from Pascal Metrics Support (support@pascalmetrics.com) with a link to the survey. Paper surveys will be provided to departments that require them. As with the 2012 survey, all responses will remain strictly confidential. Some questions will be specific to employees’ individual work unit, but in order to ensure that no employee can be identified by his or her answers, hospital leadership will not receive any individual responses. Leadership will only be provided with a report that summarizes overall patterns of responses.
“In order to provide the highest quality and safest patient care, we must continuously learn from our mistakes as individuals, teams and an institution,” said Associate Chief Quality Officer Allen Kachalia, MD. “The bigger-picture culture perspective that the survey results provide allows us to do exactly this, helping guide our way to improvement.”