Patient Safety Update
Safety Culture Survey Results Identify Improvement Opportunities
BWH’s first safety culture survey sought feedback in November from 4,000 clinical staff to gauge their perceptions of patient safety at the hospital and help identify ways to improve it. Approximately 900 staff responded and pointed to two key areas for improvement: handoff communication and feedback to frontline staff.
“We see from the survey that there is a need for better communication to frontline staff about safety improvements,” said Michael Gustafson, MD, MBA, vice president of the Center for Clinical Excellence. “The improvements that we make often are the suggestions of frontline staff, and we want them to know how they have made a difference.”
The survey results also identified an opportunity for managers to emphasize the non-punitive nature of reporting errors and near misses.
Work is underway to improve handoff communication. “The Patient Safety team already is collaborating with housestaff and nursing to smooth patient transitions,” Gustafson said.
Patient Safety is working on revising the attending handoff policy and examining ways to build on the best practices in place in certain departments, such as the handoff protocols used in the PACU, Cardiac Surgery, Interventional Radiology and Thoracic Surgery.
The 15 survey questions were taken from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Patient Safety Culture Survey Tool. This enables BWH to benchmark data and compare its results to national trends.
BWH’s survey, with a 25 percent response rate, showed the hospital to be above the AHRQ national average in questions including:
Mistakes have led to positive changes here.
My supervisor/manager seriously considers staff suggestions for improving patient safety.
The questions required answers of strongly agree, agree, strongly disagree or disagree.
On other questions, BWH was comparable to the national average. However, it is difficult to draw conclusions based on only a 25 percent response rate, Gustafson said.
Patient Safety will continue to reassess its methods for administering this survey and has plans to send out a second survey in 2009.